Attorneys representing two Colorado local governments are set for a high-stakes legal showdown over climate change Monday at the U.S. Supreme Court, where they’ll ask justices to allow Boulder’s lawsuit seeking monetary damages from two fossil fuel companies to proceed in state court. With help from the Trump administration, the two companies, Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil…
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Welcome back, Deadline: Legal newsletter readers. The new Supreme Court term starts Monday. We’re coming off a huge term that featured historic decisions on birthright citizenship, voting rights, tariffs, presidential firing power and more. Despite losing on citizenship and tariffs, and despite being blocked from immediately firing Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, the Trump administration is pressing backup plans on those fronts that could eventually return them to the high court.
The justices were off the bench for the summer, but they decided several important emergency matters, including ones related to the November midterm elections. Although they backed Donald Trump’s White House ballroom construction — over a notable dissent led by Chief Justice John Roberts — the justices blocked the president’s mail ballot restrictions as well as Missouri’s bid to use a congressional map that could’ve gained Republicans another House seat next month.
Trump lashed out on social media following those losses, calling his three high court picks who ruled against him “merely a shell of their original selves.” In a line that Democrats likely agree with but for different reasons, he said the court’s “inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History.”
The dramatic complaint follows a term that was an overall win for Trump and the GOP. And just this month, the court granted emergency relief ahead of the midterms for Republicans on campaign broadcast advertising rates and, for the administration, on using a citizenship verification database — the latter over dissent from the court’s Democratic appointees, who raised concerns about lawful voters being
Attorneys general from three Republican-led states sued three Democratic-led states in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, arguing that laws shielding abortion providers from extradition and prosecution are unconstitutional.
Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama filed the lawsuit against New York, Massachusetts and California, arguing the blue states’ laws have violated the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution, which requires states to respect the laws of other states; the equal sovereignty doctrine, which requires Congress to treat states equally; the so-called Dormant Commerce Clause, which prevents states from impeding interstate commerce; and the federal common law of public nuisance, which allows states to sue over harm inflicted by other states. The attorneys general are seeking an injunction preventing the other states from enforcing their shield laws.
Several blue states — nearly two dozen, plus Washington, D.C. — have laws protecting reproductive healthcare. Adopted after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in June 2022, many of the laws protect providers mailing abortion pills into states that ban or severely restrict abortion. But the lawsuit alleges those laws circumvent the high court’s decision to leave abortion policy to individual states, characterizing shield laws as “one of the most serious interstate aggressions in our Nation’s history” and “swords disguised as shields and driven into pro-life states.”
Referring to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overruled Roe v. Wade, the filing states, “Dobbs is no more than a parchment promise if shield-law states can defy this Court by unilaterally decreeing that abortions must flourish in pro-life states.”
The complaint cites refusals by Govs. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., and Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., to cooperate with extradition requests
We speak with Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil about his new memoir, No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention. It details his 104 days of detention inside a Louisiana ICE jail after he was targeted for arrest and deportation by the Trump administration over his pro-Palestine campus advocacy at Columbia University. Khalil missed the birth of his first child, Deen, while he was separated from…
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Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill and the attorneys general in Arkansas and Alabama filed a lawsuit Tuesday in the U.S. Supreme Court, suing California, Massachusetts and New York to invalidate the so-called “shield laws” that have allowed providers in those states to send abortion medication to people in states with abortion bans. The state officials, all Republicans…
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The Supreme Court announced Monday that Justice Samuel Alito won’t participate in the first case that will be argued in the new court term, which kicks off in just a week.
The surprise announcement follows a previous statement from the court that Alito was advised by the court’s counsel that, despite his energy stock holdings, his recusal wasn’t required in the appeal from oil and gas companies seeking to avoid state court liability for alleged damage from climate change.
The news appeared in the form of a letter published on the docket in Suncor v. Boulder, stating only that Alito “has determined that he will not continue to participate in this case.”
Although the letter gave no explanation for the last-minute exit, the George W. Bush appointee’s idiosyncratic investment practices have prevented him from participating in previous cases. A 2024 Bloomberg report noted that he was the only justice “with a stake in more than two dozen individual companies” and that most justices own mutual funds, which don’t create the same conflicts posed by individual stocks.
The financial conflict issue led Alito to recuse from another energy case earlier this year right before it was argued. Notably, in that prior case, Chevron v. Plaquemines Parish, the court provided an explanation for his recusal, writing that it was due to a “financial interest” in a company that was a party in the litigation. Alito’s absence doesn’t seem to have mattered to the outcome in the Chevron case, in which an eight-member court unanimously sided with the company in April.
The effect of his absence in the Suncor case, which presents different legal issues, remains to be