Supreme Court begins new term on a quieter note than last, but that could change
The new U.S. Supreme Court term opens next week with a lower-temperature docket compared with last term, which saw blockbuster rulings on voting rights, immigration, transgender participation in school sports and President Donald Trump’s policies on tariffs, birthright citizenship, and the removal of federal officers.
But many a high court term has started out looking sleepier than the one before it only to shift into a higher gear with the addition of more big merits cases. The court added three more cases to its docket on Thursday, and it will continue adding cases for several months.
With this fall’s elections and the Trump administration continuing to bring a range of issues to the Supreme Court on its emergency docket, “it just seems to me that we probably can’t judge the term all that well in September,” said Mark Rienzi, a law professor at the Catholic University of America.
“By December or January, we may look up and have three or four huge things that we didn’t know were coming that end up filling out the docket as the year goes on,” Rienzi said recently at the law school’s first Supreme Court Preview.
Gregory G. Garre, a partner at Latham & Watkins and a former U.S. solicitor general under President George W. Bush, said he is struck that the new term “is not of the same-level blockbuster term that we’ve seen in recent years.”
That “is good for the Supreme Court and the justices to take a turn focusing just on less important issues,” he said during an online discussion this week sponsored by American University’s Washington College of Law and the American Bar Association.
Still, “there are a number of important issues” in the new term, he said.
Religion, guns and juries on the docket
One of the most anticipated cases is St. Mary’s Catholic Church v. Roy, which involves whether Colorado may exclude Catholic providers from its universal preschool program because they refuse to abide by state anti-discrimination laws with regard to LGBTQ+ students, as the church argues that it should be allowed to admit only families that support Catholic beliefs. That case is set for argument on Nov. 3.
Another major case is Viramontes v. Cook County, consolidated with Grant v. Higgins, which involves whether the Second and 14th Amendments guarantee individuals the right to own AR-15s and similar assault rifles. The case involves challenges to restrictions on those weapons in Cook County, Illinois (which includes Chicago), and the state of Connecticut.
The case gives the court the opportunity to refine its Second Amendment analytical tests while considering weapons that have been used in multiple mass shootings but are owned by many Americans (with estimates in the briefs ranging from 16 million to 25 million). The case will be argued Dec. 2.
Meanwhile, in Kian v. Florida, the court will consider whether the use of a six-person jury to try felonies violates either the Sixth or 14th Amendment rights of defendants to a trial by the 12-member juries used in federal courts and all but a few other states. The case involves a Florida man convicted by a six-person jury of five felony counts of practicing chiropractic medicine with a suspended license. It has not yet been scheduled for argument.
A climate change case with ‘significant’ stakes
On Oct. 5, the first day of the term, the justices will tackle Suncor Energy (U.S.A.) Inc. v. Commissioners of Boulder County, a major case involving local governments’ efforts to hold fossil fuel companies liable for the in-state effects of climate change caused by the companies and alleged misrepresentations to the public about their role.
Boulder County and the City of Boulder in Colorado sued Suncor as well as industry giant Exxon Mobil Corp. in state court, seeking to hold them responsible for the effects of greenhouse gases that have generally been accepted (though not by all) as warming the planet and causing wildfires, heat waves, droughts and floods.
“The stakes on this case are significant,” says Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president for programs at EarthJustice, an environmental legal organization which has written an amicus in support of Boulder. There are some two dozen similar suits brought by local governments in state courts across the country, he says.
“If the Supreme Court were to say these cases couldn’t continue, it would block many different cases arising on many different theories in various states,” Sankar says.
The Colorado plaintiffs have asserted common-law claims such as public nuisance, private nuisance, trespass, unjust enrichment and civil conspiracy.
“The plaintiffs and their taxpayers cannot pay the full costs of all that is needed to attempt to mitigate the harm caused by climate change, nor should they,” Boulder (city and county) said in its complaint. “The costs should be shared by Exxon and the Suncor defendants because they knowingly caused and contributed to the alteration of the climate by producing, promoting, refining, marketing and selling fossil fuels at levels that have caused and continue to cause climate change while concealing and/or misrepresenting the dangers associated with fossil fuels’ intended use.”
Suncor and Exxon Mobil Corp. unsuccessfully sought to remove the case to federal court. They argue that the state lawsuit involves extraterritorial regulation in violation of the U.S. Constitution, including the foreign affairs power, and was preempted by the federal Clean Air Act.
The Colorado Supreme Court, exercising original jurisdiction at an early stage, ruled that neither the Constitution nor federal law barred Boulder’s claims, and remanded it for further proceedings. (The Hawaii Supreme Court allowed a similar suit brought by the city of Honolulu to go forward, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review that case in 2025. In March, the Maryland Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal of a similar suit brought by Baltimore and two other local governments.)
In granting review, the U.S. Supreme Court asked the parties to brief whether it had jurisdiction to consider the case based on Boulder’s claim that the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling is not a final state court judgment, a fine point which gives the justices an off-ramp if they want it.
In their merits brief, Suncor and Exxon Mobil Corp. call the plaintiffs’ theories in the Boulder and similar cases “dubious” and adds, “The requested damages in any one case could reach into the billions.”
Philip S. Goldberg, a special counsel to the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project of the National Association of Manufacturers, says the plaintiffs in these suits “are making political decisions based on which [energy] companies are in their state,” and the complaints “have been carefully packaged to appeal to parochial interests of state courts by invoking state law and seeking money for local constituencies.”
Goldberg, who filed an amicus for NAM in support of Suncor and Exxon Mobil Corp., says “greenhouse gas emissions and their impact on climate change [have been] ubiquitous around the globe for last 150 to 200 years. In these cases, there’s really no principled way to have litigation deciding the rights and responsibilities over climate change. You need Congress, and you need federal agencies … to make these kinds of decisions.”
A late recusal
Boulder agrees that Congress is perhaps better situated to address climate change across the nation, but “the Constitution generally permits states to use their traditional authority to address harms arising within their own borders.”
Boulder says the Clean Air Act does not preempt the type of state court suit it has brought, and in any event the Trump administration is reconsidering the role of the statute in controlling greenhouse-gas emissions. That refers to a recent announcement that the administration is rolling back the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations in this area.
“The Trump administration is a little trying to have its cake and eat it too,” says Sankar of EarthJustice. “It would seem hard to to argue both that the federal government can’t regulate this and that state governments can’t sue about it.”
A late-breaking development this week added some more drama to the case. Justice Samuel Alito announced that he would no longer participate. He didn’t provide a reason, but a coalition of watchdog groups in May had called attention to Alito’s stock holdings in energy companies and said his participation in the case would undermine confidence in the court.
At the time, a court spokeswoman had told NBC News that Alito did not have holdings in Suncor or Exxon Mobil Corp. and that the court’s in-house legal counsel had advised the justice that his recusal was not required. But Alito has recused from some other recent cases involving oil and gas companies in which he did have holdings.
Garre, at the American University/ABA event, noted that the case could now result in a 4-4 tie, which would affirm the Colorado Supreme Court without an opinion and allow Boulder’s suit to proceed.
The Alito recusal “makes it a whole lot more interesting in terms of where the court will end up,” he said.
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