The Supreme Court will hear a case in November over whether the Catholic Church can exclude children of gay parents from a taxpayer-funded preschool. Its new term opens with a 6-3 conservative majority and disputes over climate policy, religion, guns and the Trump administration.
The court’s docket puts public funding, local regulation and government authority before the justices. The preschool case asks how religious institutions’ rights meet rules attached to a publicly funded service. The article reports no decision and identifies no funding terms beyond calling the preschool taxpayer-funded.
Public money and religious authority
The Colorado dispute follows high-profile rulings affirming religious groups’ rights. One decision found 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 recent rulings suggest 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.
The court has also shielded religious institutions such as churches and schools from employment-discrimination lawsuits. Demonstrators gathered outside the Supreme Court when it issued that ruling on July 8, 2020.
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 Louisiana-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Texas law, despite a 1980 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a nearly identical Kentucky law. Genevieve Lakier, a First Amendment expert at the University of Chicago Law School, said legal experts would have expected the Supreme Court to reject the appeals court ruling five or 10 years ago. The court’s expansion of First Amendment protections for the free exercise of religion, she said, leaves the outcome uncertain. “This is going to be very illuminating if it doesn’t,” Lakier said of the court taking up the issue.
Climate claims and limits on state power
The justices return from summer break on Oct. 5 to hear a case involving Boulder, Colorado, and whether local governments can seek damages from fossil fuel companies for climate-change harms. Similar lawsuits have been filed across the country, with billions of dollars potentially at stake.
Bridget Fahey, an expert at the University of Chicago Law School on federal-state relations, said the case could affect whether states and local governments can regulate activity originating 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,” Fahey said.
Republican attorneys general oppose Boulder’s lawsuit and want the court to broadly prevent states from effectively forcing policy changes elsewhere. Michael Williams, the solicitor general for West Virginia, who helped write their filing, said, “We don’t think that there’s a role for one state to regulate the activities that are happening in another state.” The case pits local governments’ claims for climate damages against fossil fuel companies’ challenge to that authority.
Weapons, immigration and elections
In December, the court will consider whether state and local governments can ban semiautomatic rifles such as AR-15s in response to mass shootings. The combined cases come from Illinois and Connecticut. Millions of Americans own AR-15s, and Don Verrilli, a former solicitor general under President Barack Obama, is among legal experts who predict the court will say the rifles can’t be banned. The cases also raise the question of how the court will apply its rule that modern gun regulations must not stray too far from historical weapons regulations.
The justices will consider whether the administration can detain millions of immigrants without a chance to seek bond and 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. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school and a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, said more challenges to Trump policies are likely. “I just think, given the Trump administration and the times we live in,” he said, “every term is going to have blockbuster cases.”
The court will also debate a Republican push to enforce strict Arizona voting laws in December. Cecilia Wang, national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “Everyone’s eyes are on the election,” adding, “You can expect emergency applications to go up to the court relating to the election.” The court may be asked to resolve election disputes quickly around the November midterms.