The Supreme Court will hear a Colorado case in November on whether the Catholic Church can exclude children of gay parents from a taxpayer-funded preschool. It’s one of several fights awaiting the justices, who return from summer break on Oct. 5 to begin a term with a 6-3 conservative majority. The docket touches climate change, religion, guns and the Trump administration.
Religion, Public Money and Who Gets Served
The preschool dispute follows high-profile rulings favoring religious groups. In one, the court held that Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” for young people infringed on a Christian counselor’s free-speech rights. Roman Martinez, a partner at Latham & Watkins who has frequently argued before the court, said the recent trend suggests the Catholic Church is likely to win. “Colorado, on the other hand, does not have a great track record in these cases,” he said at Georgetown Law’s Supreme Court Institute.
An earlier ruling shielded religious institutions such as churches and schools from employment-discrimination lawsuits. Demonstrators gathered outside the court when it issued the ruling on July 8, 2020, six years ago.
A second religion case is waiting in the wings. A coalition of multifaith families, backed by the ACLU, has asked the justices to decide whether Texas can require public schools to display the Ten Commandments. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Texas law, even though the Supreme Court struck down a nearly identical Kentucky law in 1980, 46 years ago. Genevieve Lakier, a First Amendment expert at the University of Chicago Law School, said legal experts would have assumed five or 10 years ago that the court would reject the appeals court’s ruling. Now, it’s unclear whether the justices will even take the case. “This is going to be very illuminating if it doesn’t,” she said.
Climate, Guns and Who Holds Power
The term opens with a landmark climate case. It asks whether local governments may seek damages from fossil fuel companies for climate-change harms. Boulder, Colorado, brought the suit, and similar lawsuits have been filed across the country. Billions of dollars are potentially at stake.
Bridget Fahey, a University of Chicago Law School expert on federal-state relations, said the case could affect states’ and local governments’ ability to regulate activity that starts outside their borders, including artificial intelligence. “Even though it’s about climate change, which feels about as big as it comes, I do feel it’s a bit of a proxy case for another major regulatory question that we’re going to see in the coming years, which is state AI regulation,” she said.
Republican attorneys general want the court to broadly block states from effectively forcing policy changes elsewhere. Michael Williams, West Virginia’s solicitor general, helped write their filing opposing Boulder. “We don’t think that there’s a role for one state to regulate the activities that are happening in another state,” he said.
Boulder County knows the stakes of a warming climate firsthand. The Marshall Fire there on Dec. 30, 2021, four years ago, killed two people and destroyed more than 1,000 structures. It remains Colorado’s most destructive wildfire. Wind gusts of up to 100 mph pushed embers through vegetation that normally would have been damp or covered in snow at that time of year.
In December, the court will debate whether state and local governments can ban semiautomatic rifles such as AR-15s in response to mass shootings. Don Verrilli, a former solicitor general under President Barack Obama, said the combined cases from Illinois and Connecticut may be the most important Second Amendment cases since the court’s 2008 ruling, 18 years ago, that the amendment protects an individual’s right to possess firearms for traditionally lawful purposes. Millions of Americans own AR-15s, and Verrilli is among the legal experts who predict the court will say they can’t be banned. He said the case also sharply raises questions about the court’s recent rule that modern gun regulations must not stray too far from historical ones.
Immigration, the Executive and the Ballot Box
The justices will consider whether the administration can detain millions of immigrants without giving them a chance to seek bond. They’ll also consider whether it can deport immigrants to countries other than their own without letting them argue they could face persecution or torture there.
Last term, the court rejected President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and his attempt to redefine birthright citizenship. The justices have picked about half of this term’s cases. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said more challenges to Trump policies are likely. Those could include a dispute over his new tariffs and clashes between congressional Democrats and the administration if Democrats win the House or Senate in November. “I just think, given the Trump administration and the times we live in,” Chemerinsky said, “every term is going to have blockbuster cases.”
Elections will test the court too. In December, it will debate a Republican push to enforce strict Arizona voting laws. Cecilia Wang, national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “Everyone’s eyes are on the election.” She added: “You can expect emergency applications to go up to the court relating to the election.”
Why This Matters: The cases on this docket will decide who bears the costs and who gets the protections. A taxpayer-funded preschool could turn away children because of their parents. Cities like Boulder could lose a tool for seeking damages from fossil fuel companies, while billions of dollars hang in the balance. Immigrants could face detention without a bond hearing or deportation to places where they say they face torture. Voters could see election rules settled by emergency order just before the midterms. Each question asks how far public institutions can go in protecting residents, and how much the courts will let them do. The answers will reach well beyond Washington, into classrooms, city budgets and polling places.