Who Gets Shut Out
The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted Cisco’s bid to shut down a lawsuit claiming that the company’s technology was used to persecute members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement in China, ruling that American courts are the wrong forum for the suits and rejecting arguments that the cases should go forward under the Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act. For the people alleging persecution, the message from the bench was simple: the courthouse is not for you.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion that the justices “close the door” that the court slightly opened in 2004 when it suggested that some human-rights claims might be viable under the Alien Tort Statute. “In truth, this class is a null set,” Barrett wrote, while acknowledging such cases “frequently involve heinous and inhumane acts.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the court “closes the courthouse doors not just to respondents, but to virtually every future litigant seeking redress for a violation of international law under the ATS.”
Falun Gong members had argued that a substantial portion of Cisco’s activities involving China took place in the United States. In 2008, documents leaked to the press showed Cisco saw the “Golden Shield,” China’s internet censorship effort, as a sales opportunity. The company quoted a Chinese official calling the Falun Gong an “evil cult.” A Cisco presentation reviewed by the AP from the same year said its products could identify over 90% of Falun Gong material on the web. Other presentations reviewed by the AP showed that Cisco represented Falun Gong material as a “threat” and built out a national information system to track Falun Gong believers.
In 2011, Falun Gong members sued Cisco, alleging the company tailored technology for Beijing that it knew would be used to track, detain and torture believers. At arguments in April, Sotomayor said Cisco “knew that those people will be tortured.” A lawyer for the company said, “Cisco vigorously disputes those allegations.”
The Property Line the Court Protects
The Supreme Court also rejected an effort to change tax foreclosure sales to let homeowners keep more money when their property is sold to recoup unpaid taxes. The court ruled against a sweeping argument from a Michigan family whose house was sold for less than half its open-market value to cover an unpaid tax bill of just over $2,000. They argued the foreclosure violated their rights because the house would have fetched a higher price of nearly $200,000 if sold through typical real-estate channels.
The Supreme Court unanimously found that people aren’t entitled to recoup a “hypothetical fair market value” of homes sold at auction to cover unpaid taxes. Auctions are designed to be a relatively quick way to collect unpaid taxes, and requiring local governments to get the higher fair-market value might make them unworkable, Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “The traditional rule, under which the taxpayer receives only the difference between the auction sale price and unpaid taxes, is ‘just,’” he wrote. The sale, though, must be conducted fairly, he wrote. The court sent the Pung family’s case back to lower courts to reassess the process used by Isabella County.
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Neil Gorsuch, wrote separately to raise doubts about the constitutionality of the foreclosure process. Larry Salzman, vice president for litigation at the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented the family, said, “The case isn’t over.” He said, “The Pungs won the right to continue their fight in the lower courts.” The county maintained that auction sale prices are always lower than open real estate transactions, in part because they typically require full cash payment rather than a mortgage. Attorney Matthew Nelson, who represented the county, said, “Officials make herculean efforts to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.” He said, “But at the end of the day, foreclosure is a tool that needs to remain in their toolboxes.” He said, “We are confident the process Isabella County followed in this case exceeded what the law required.”
The case comes about three years after another major foreclosure case where the justices ruled against local governments. The court found counties can’t keep tax sale proceeds beyond what the owner owes in unpaid taxes. That case centered on a 94-year-old Minnesota woman whose county government kept about $40,000 in proceeds from the sale of her condominium after she failed to pay about $2,300 in taxes.
Power Over People, by the Numbers
In an immigration case dealing with green card holders, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Tuesday in a case over the government’s power over green card holders accused of crimes. The 6-3 decision centers on an immigration officers’ 2012 decision to put lawful permanent resident Muk Choi Lau on immigration parole when he returned from a short trip to China because he had been accused of a counterfeiting crime. Lau argued that the officer overstepped their authority, and the decision wrongly allowed the Department of Homeland Security under then-President Barack Obama an easier path to removal after he pleaded guilty to selling counterfeit clothes in New Jersey. The high court disagreed.
“Border officers did not have the burden to establish by clear and convincing evidence that Lau had committed a crime involving moral turpitude,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, writing that the decision to put Lau on immigration parole effectively sentenced him to “immigration limbo” before he’d been convicted of any crime. “I worry that the Court has now handed the Government a massive blank check,” she wrote in the dissent joined by her two liberal colleagues.
The liberal group Alliance for Justice said the ruling could provide an expanded path for revoking green cards. Advancing American Freedom, a group founded by former Republican Vice President Mike Pence, called it an important case to allow the removal of people who “abuse the privilege of being granted lawful permanent resident status.” The decision comes as the high court considers a series of immigration-related issues against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, though this case started before Trump took office. His administration argued that suspicion of a crime is enough to put a lawful permanent resident, also known as a green-card holder, on immigration parole. Federal attorneys urged the court to take an expansive view of executive authority over immigration.
The court is also considering cases over Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship, potentially revive a restrictive asylum policy and end temporary legal protections for migrants fleeing war and natural disasters in their homelands.
A Court That Keeps Choosing Sides
The court also split 6-3 in a decision that will make it easier for the government to deport green card holders who are convicted of certain crimes. It also split along ideological lines on the most substantial holding of a decision that blocks members of the Falun Gong religious movement from suing Cisco for selling equipment to the Chinese government they said aided and abetted the group’s torture. Four of the five decisions the court released Tuesday were 6-3.
Those included a ruling that barred a Rastafarian man from suing prison officials who violated a federal law when they cut his dreadlocks and a decision that permitted Exxon to sue over property confiscated by the Cuban government in 1960. The Supreme Court hit an inauspicious milestone Tuesday as it raced to finish its most divisive pending cases by the end of the month: It has already handed down more 6-3 decisions along ideological lines than it did for the entire term that ended last year.
As it navigates a charged political atmosphere during President Donald Trump’s second term and endures sharp criticism from the left and right, the court has already split into conservative and liberal camps in seven decisions this year — one more than last year — before it even gets to major cases on presidential power and transgender rights. Some of those decisions, including on whether Trump may fire officials at independent federal agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, may also divide the court along ideological lines. The justices are scheduled to drop their next batch of opinions on Thursday.
The most significant 6-3 decision so far this term was the court’s April ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act’s power over redistricting disputes. The decision, and several that followed from it, helped Republicans quickly redraw congressional district in Southern states like Louisiana and Alabama to give the GOP an advantage in this year’s midterm elections. And those numbers do not take into account rulings on the court’s emergency docket, where the liberal and conservative wings have split more frequently.
The court’s tendency to decide important cases along 6-3 partisan lines is a serious problem for the court’s legitimacy, said David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor who frequently argued before the court as the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The justices are supposed to be guided by law, not politics,” Cole said. “Even if many divides reflect differences in legal worldview, not politics, the more they divide along party lines, the less credibility the court has as an institution,” he said.
To be sure, some of the most important cases this term have brought liberal and conservative justices together. The court’s decision in February to invalidate Trump’s sweeping global tariffs counted three conservatives and three liberals in the majority. Last week, the court unanimously decided that the Second Amendment barred the government from disarming a Texas man just because he frequently smokes pot.
But the number of 6-3 ideological decisions is often trotted out by the court’s critics and its supporters as both attempt to frame the court’s direction as they lodge and parry criticism of how the court is resolving politically fraught issues. The justices themselves will often brush aside the 6-3 outcomes and point out the large share of cases that are decided unanimously, even though those usually involve more technical questions with far less reach.
“It bothers me because it’s not accurate,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative, said last month at the George W. Bush Presidential Center of the focus on 6-3 decisions. The far higher share of opinions that are decided unanimously, Barrett said, “is not the narrative that’s portrayed in the media.” Speaking at the Reagan Library last month, Justice Neil Gorsuch made a similar point. “Nine old people appointed by five different presidents over the course of 30 years from all around the country, and we are able to resolve cases lower courts disagreed on unanimously 40% of the time,” said Gorsuch, who was Trump’s first nominee to the high court. “I think that’s something.”
The high court has decided more than half of its 46 decisions so far this term unanimously, a slightly higher share than last year by the end of June. But the biggest and most complicated decisions delivered in the final days of a term are rarely unanimous. With a dozen cases still waiting for a ruling this year, the share of unanimous cases will likely plummet. From 2020 to 2024, nearly 14% of the court’s merits decisions were split along ideological lines, according to data compiled by SCOTUSblog.
Even before the court turned toward its final month, the justices increasingly were sniping at one another — in written opinions and in public — over their role in the redistricting cases. “Courts are apolitical,” liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s most junior justice, said last month. “We have to be scrupulous about sticking to the principles and the rules that we apply in every case and not look as though we’re doing something different in this kind of context.” Jackson’s point echoed a dissent she wrote in an emergency docket case days earlier involving Louisiana’s ability to quickly redraw its congressional districts. Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s conservative wing, responded in a brief concurring opinion by describing Jackson’s points as “trivial at best” and “baseless and insulting.” “What principle has the court violated?” Alito wrote. “The principle that we should never take any action that might unjustifiably be criticized as partisan?”
Over the next week, the court is expected to rule on Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship as it has been understood for more than a century as well as the president’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Based on the oral arguments, those decisions may well wind up with some conservatives and liberals together in the majority. But also pending are cases dealing with the president’s power to fire the leaders of other independent agencies, turn away asylum seekers at the border and cancel temporary deportation protections for Haitian and Syrian nationals. The court is considering an important Second Amendment case over a Hawaii law that makes it harder to carry guns into private property open to the public, like retail stores. And it is weighing two cases dealing with laws enacted by West Virginia and Idaho that ban transgender girls from competing on girls’ sports teams. All of those are candidates for splitting the court 6-3.