News

Can Veterans Sue First? The Supreme Court Takes Up VA Gatekeeping

For decades, veterans have been told some version of the same thing: Start with the VA . File the paperwork. Take your place in the line. If you lose, appeal. If you lose again, appeal again. And only at the far end of that long hallway does a real judge eventually appear. Now the Supreme Court is...

Supreme Court to Decide If Veterans Can Skip the VA Appeals Track

Every civics student learns the comforting phrase: you can take your case to court. Then real life walks in and asks a harder question: which court, when , and on whose timeline ? Next term, the Supreme Court will confront that question in a case that sits at the intersection of two American...

Supreme Court and Guns: Can Illegal Drug Users Possess Firearms?

[content] The question people are asking today is simple: Can illegal drug users own firearms under federal law? The Supreme Court’s new unanimous decision makes the honest answer more complicated, but also clearer. The Court did not erase the federal ban on gun possession by “unlawful users” of...

SCOTUS Could Overturn 91-Year Precedent

There are Supreme Court cases that feel like legal housekeeping, a quiet tightening of bolts in the machinery of government. And then there are cases that threaten to move the engine itself. In the Court’s final stretch this term, the justices are staring down a set of disputes tied to President...

Short Circuit: The Constitution in the Small

The Constitution is supposed to be the nation’s big operating system. But you do not really learn what it does by reading it in a vacuum. You learn it by watching it collide with the ordinary machinery of government: jails, school boards, zoning offices, and courtroom scheduling orders. This week’s...

The White House Octagon and the Limits of Presidential Spectacle

A cage on the White House South Lawn is not the kind of sentence most of us expect to read in a civics lesson. And yet, this weekend, an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight night is scheduled with “The Octagon” built on the South Lawn, timed to President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and framed as...

The Fifth Circuit’s Horse Racing Fight Is Back, and SCOTUS Gets the Cleanup

There is a particular kind of legal mess that doesn’t come from the Constitution itself. It comes from a lower court deciding, repeatedly, that it knows better than everyone else, including the Supreme Court. That is where we are again with federal regulation of horse racing. A deeply conservative...

The Supreme Court and the Weather-Delayed Ballot

Most election disputes are fought with spreadsheets and statutes. This one is being fought with wind, ice, and a single, stubborn fact of American geography: in parts of the United States, the mail does not move on a predictable timetable. The Supreme Court is considering a challenge that could...

A Supreme Court Mail Ballot Case With Big Stakes for Snowy, Remote States

Election Day often brings to mind a polling place, a line, and results that start rolling in that night. But for many Americans, especially in rural and remote communities, voting looks different. It can depend on a plane, a boat, a snow machine, or simply the hope that the mail arrives on time....

The Death Row Split Between Kavanaugh and Gorsuch

Some constitutional rules look clean on paper but messy in a courtroom. The doctrine promises an orderly sequence, yet real trials move fast, objections overlap, and judges are forced to make credibility calls on the fly. When that happens, a procedural misfire can turn into the whole case: did the...

Supreme Court Reopens Fight Over Gas Furnace Rules

The Supreme Court reopened a fight over federal efficiency rules for natural gas home-heating equipment this week, vacating a lower-court decision that had upheld the Biden-era standards and sending the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. No full opinion, no sweeping...

Supreme Court Revives Challenge to Biden-Era Gas Furnace Rule

The Supreme Court has reopened a fight over federal energy efficiency standards for home heating, clearing the way for natural gas trade groups to keep challenging a Biden-era rule that would effectively push a large share of today’s gas furnaces out of the market. The Court did not issue a full...

Of Course Trump Is Going After E. Jean Carroll

When a private citizen sues a powerful public figure and wins, that is the legal system doing what it is supposed to do. When that same person then becomes the target of a criminal investigation under an administration led by the figure she sued, it is hard not to hear the warning embedded in the...

Trump Presses DOJ ‘Weaponization’ Fund After Court Block and Walkout

There are two very different ways to read a president insisting a controversial government fund should “move forward” after the Justice Department has backed away and a judge has already blocked it. One reading is political. The other is constitutional. And right now, President Donald Trump is...

The Roberts Court Won’t Stop Dismantling the Voting Rights Act

It is one thing for the Supreme Court to narrow a landmark statute in a signed opinion after full briefing, argument, and a public explanation. It is another thing entirely to do it in the dark, by unsigned order, on the emergency docket, with a few paragraphs that function like a shrug. That is...

WNBA Weighs ‘USA 250’ All-Star Patches After Slavery Objection

The WNBA is weighing whether to add a “USA 250” patch to uniforms for the league’s All-Star Game on July 25 in Chicago , hosted by the Chicago Sky . It is a small piece of fabric that has turned into a big civic argument: what does it mean to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary when the...

SCOTUS Passed on the Hunter Biden Laptop Case

Some Supreme Court moves arrive with a bang. Others arrive with a shrug, and that shrug can still matter. The Court declined to take up a case tied to the Hunter Biden laptop . There is no blockbuster merits ruling to parse, no sweeping new test announced. But a pass is still a decision. It still...

The Court Just Made Its Voting Rights Damage Worse

Here is the question I wish every civics student would ask before we start arguing about parties, personalities, or punditry: What is the Supreme Court for ? If your answer is “to enforce the rule of law,” then Tuesday evening’s unsigned shadow-docket order in the Alabama redistricting fight should...

A painful case out of Southampton, England is now reverberating well beyond the U.K. After 18-year-old Henry Nowak was stabbed and later died while in police custody, senior U.S. officials publicly condemned what happened. Downing Street, in turn, pushed back, warning outsiders not to inflame...

Thomas Scolds Court’s Priorities After Death-Row Ruling

One of the hardest things to explain about the Supreme Court is that it is not required to take most cases. The justices choose their docket , and that choice can be as consequential as any final ruling. This week, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a pointed dissent that was less about the legal...