by Jordan Rubin | Jul 20, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, Supreme Court
“Is a personal nuclear weapon protected by the Second Amendment?” – Rebecca Klemm
Hi Rebecca,
No.
Although the Supreme Court has increasingly recognized Second Amendment rights over the past two decades, that trend is unlikely to produce a right to possess personal nuclear weapons.
To understand why, let’s look at how the court evaluates Second Amendment claims these days.
Start with the amendment’s text, which says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Despite the militia reference, the court said in 2008 that people have a personal right to possess firearms at home for self-defense, unrelated to militia service. Yet that 5-4 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller also emphasized that the right is not unlimited. Rather, it applies to weapons in “common use” for lawful purposes and doesn’t apply to “dangerous and unusual” weapons. The type of firearm at issue in the Heller case was a handgun, which the court called “the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home.”
In 2022, with the current six-justice majority in place, the court expanded on Heller in the Bruen case by approving a right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home. The court also announced a new, two-part test for deciding whether a gun law violates the Second Amendment. Step one of the Bruen test asks whether the amendment covers the conduct that the law seeks to regulate. If it does, then under step two, the law can’t stand unless it’s “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
The test has
by Jordan Rubin | Jul 20, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to review the standard for evaluating unconstitutionally excessive fines in a case over Alaska seizing a $95,000 airplane for illegally transporting beer.
Bush pilot Ken Jouppi argues that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on such fines was “built for cases like” his, in which the state has been trying to take his 1969 Cessna because his passenger had beer in her luggage and the state said that at least one six-pack would have been visible to the pilot. Jouppi was set to fly the passenger to a “dry” village that banned alcohol.
His lawyers with the Institute for Justice said in his petition that “an airplane forfeited for a six-pack” violates the excessive fines clause and raises an important question for the justices to answer about how courts must analyze such seizures. That question, they said, is whether courts should consider the gravity of the underlying offense “purely in the abstract” or by examining “the specific defendant’s wrongdoing.”
They said the Alaska Supreme Court’s ruling against Jouppi “adopted a minority view” among the nation’s courts by examining his case in “paradigmatically abstract terms.”
The state court said the forfeiture was constitutional because it wasn’t “grossly disproportional to the gravity of the harm caused by Jouppi’s alcohol importation offense.” It said the value of his plane is “only 9.5 times the maximum fine that could have been imposed” against him.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case for the coming term that starts in October, with a decision expected by July. It takes four justices to grant review of a petition, but the vote tally isn’t public. How the
by Jordan Rubin | Jul 6, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
The Supreme Court sided with Texas on Monday in emergency litigation over a law that its opponents said marked the first time a state has ever required its citizens “to prove their age before reading a newspaper, entering a bookstore, or even accessing the internet.”
Student and trade groups brought emergency applications to the high court against the law, called the App Store Accountability Act. The law is intended to help parents direct and supervise children’s downloads of apps and in-app purchases by requiring age verification, parental consent and age rating and content display.
A federal judge halted the law, finding that it was likely unconstitutional due to its restrictions on speech. Then a federal appellate panel granted the state’s request to lift the judge’s order, leading the groups to seek urgent relief from the high court.
Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a nonprofit that says its mission is to mobilize young people around educational advocacy and increase youth visibility in policymaking, said the justices should vacate the appellate order “and restore the status quo protecting Texas minors’ access to constitutionally protected content and their parents’ authority to make different content decisions for their families.”
SEAT said the case raises First Amendment issues beyond Texas because most states now have laws requiring age verification or age restrictions for accessing protected speech.
The group cited a high court case from last year in another Texas appeal, where the court said states can require age verification to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content. SEAT said this case is different from last year’s ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton because the speech at issue in that
by Jordan Rubin | Jul 2, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court didn’t give Donald Trump everything he asked for this term. But it gave the Republican president and his party a lot, ranging from presidential power (more of it) to immigration (less of it) to voting rights (less of them) to campaign finance rules (less of them, too) and more.
In the handful of big cases Trump lost — including tariffs (by a 6-3 vote), mail-in ballot deadlines (by a 5-4 vote) and birthright citizenship (by a 5-4 or 6-3 vote; more on the difference below) — the results said more about the extreme nature of his asks and the dissenting justices who were eager to answer them.
The birthright citizenship case is Exhibit A. It was expected that Chief Justice John Roberts would lead the court in striking down Trump’s executive order that sought to override the Constitution, federal law and precedent dating back to 1898.
The unexpected part was that Roberts spoke for only five justices when he confirmed that Trump’s order violated the constitutional guarantee of citizenship for virtually all babies born in this country.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” the chief justice wrote, as he recalled that the framers of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment extended that promise to “every free-born person in this land.” He concluded his opinion by saying, “We keep that promise today.”
But the “we” was only a bare majority of the court: Roberts, the three Democratic appointees and Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh
by Jordan Rubin | Jul 1, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
When the Supreme Court declined to consider President Donald Trump’s appeal against E. Jean Carroll on Monday, she moved a step closer to collecting her $5 million (plus interest) from one of the two civil cases she won against him.
On Tuesday, her lawyers said the president was still trying to put off paying but that it was “the end of the line” and “time for him to pay Carroll.”
They made those statements in a court filing to the New York district court that oversaw her 2023 trial, where a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing the writer in 1996 and defaming her in 2022. Carroll’s lawyers said that “after four years of litigation across every level of the federal court system, it is time for this case to end.”
The latest potential hitch is that her lawyers said a lawyer for Trump has asked if they would agree to further delay so he can ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its refusal to review his petition. Carroll’s lawyers declined another postponement, noting a prior stipulation between the parties provides for payment upon the denial of Trump’s petition.
They added that there’s no reason to think the court would reconsider its denial, seeing as it just rejected Trump’s petition without any justices signaling interest in the case. It takes four justices to grant review.
“Accordingly, the Court should direct the Clerk to disburse to Carroll the value of the judgment including post-judgment interest, which amounts to $5,779,783.00 in total as of the date of this filing,” Carroll’s lawyers wrote to the district court on Tuesday. They urged the court to “reject his
by Jordan Rubin | Jun 30, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
The Supreme Court approved state bans on transgender women and girls in sports, siding with Idaho and West Virginia in cases that affect bans in more than half the states around the country.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court that under federal law and the Constitution, schools can “maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females.” The Trump appointee wrote that schools can “determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ sportsbased on biological sex.”
The court’s Democratic appointees filed separate opinions partially dissenting from the ruling.
The decision follows the court’s 6-3 ruling last term in the Skrmetti case that upheld a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The court split along those same lines earlier this term in siding with California parents on school policies that sought to prevent outing transgender students.
In the sports cases decided Tuesday, Idaho defended its Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, the first law of its kind, passed in 2020, that banned transgender women and girls from participating in women’s student sports.
The state argued against Lindsay Hecox, who was in her mid-20s and a senior at Boise State University when the justices held oral arguments in January. She had sued in 2020 when she was a freshman and wanted to try out for the women’s track and cross-country teams. She won a preliminary injunction in the trial court, and the federal appeals court that covers Idaho said the trial court didn’t abuse its discretion in finding the ban likely violates equal protection guarantees. Hecox failed to make the teams but wound up playing for the women’s club soccer team.
Idaho argued that its law is constitutionally permissible because it’s “substantially related to Idaho’s important interest in promoting female athletic opportunities.”
In the West
