Unpacking The Major Decisions Of The 2024 2025 Supreme Court Term

ACE Rebrand Update: The Alliance for Citizen Engagement is now The Alliance for Civic Engagement. With the Trump administration’s increased use of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, whereby the court can hear “emergency appeals” and rule without hearing oral arguments or issuing written decisions, the court has increasingly left... On June 27th, the 2024-2025 term came to a close ahead of its summer recess, with the court handing down some of its most controversial and consequential decisions yet. St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond

On May 22nd, the court came to a tied 4-4 vote barring public funding for the nation’s first religious public charter school in Oklahoma. Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Genter Drummond, initially brought suit against the state’s Virtual Charter School Board over their contract with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, arguing said contract violates the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, the Oklahoma Constitution, and the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Justices Alito and Kavanaugh, who seemed most sympathetic to St. Isidore’s arguments during the hearings, argued that to invalidate the contract would in itself be discrimination against the school on the basis of its religious status.

The court’s liberal bloc, Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, focused on the case’s potential threat to the separation of church and state, as charter schools are “a creation and creature of the state.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case, opening the door for a tied ruling. While she gave no explanation for her recusal, it is speculated she may’ve done so as a result of her long-standing friendship with one of St. Isidore’s advisors, Nicole Stelle Garnett. The court did not give a breakdown of which justices voted which way. In the case of a tied Supreme Court ruling, the ruling of the lower court (in this case, the Supreme Court of Oklahoma) stands.

The Supreme Court of Oklahoma ruled in Drummond’s favor against the school. The door remains open, however, for the issue of public funding for religious charters to return to the court, should a similar case emerge that does not require recusal. The National Constitution Center and the Center on the Structural Constitution at Texas A&M University School of Law are holding a review of the 2024-25 Supreme Court term. There are a multitude of excellent participants, including Sarah Isgur, the host of the “Advisory Opinions” podcast and senior editor for The Dispatch. Isgur will be speaking at 5:50 pm EDT, alongside Jonathan Adler of William & Mary Law School, Daniel Epps of Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, and Frederick Lawrence of Georgetown University Law Center.

The panel will be moderated by Katherine Mims Crocker from Texas A&M. The discussion on the term’s most significant cases will be followed by panels on the Roberts Court’s relationship with executive power and how media coverage of the Supreme Court shapes public perception. A description of all the panels and panelists can be found here. Tuesday’s event is being livestreamed on YouTube by the National Constitution Center. The past year was a significant one for the U.S. Supreme Court, with notable decisions related to the First Amendment, nationwide injunctions, and the 14th Amendment.

The court concluded its October Term 2024 on June 30, 2025 with Goldey v. Fields, a per curiam decision regarding Eighth Amendment protections for inmates making excessive force claims against prison officials. In the preceding six months, a series of major decisions defined the term that began on Oct. 7, 2024. In Trump v. CASA the court considered whether lower federal courts may issue universal injunctions blocking executive actions nationwide.

The case arose after President Donald Trump issued an executive order redefining birthright citizenship, which a federal district court enjoined on a nationwide basis. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court held that the district court exceeded the authority Congress has granted federal courts by issuing a universal injunction. The court did not address the constitutionality of the executive order under the 14th Amendment, an issue that remains pending. In United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court ruled that Tennessee’s state law prohibiting medical professionals from providing hormone therapy or puberty-delaying drugs to transgender minors did not violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause . Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion rejected arguments that the state law discriminated on the basis of sex and transgender status.

The Supreme Court also ruled in City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency that the EPA exceeded its authority under the Clean Water Act when issuing general permitting requirements. This case involved the EPA’s use of “end-result” permit requirements that compel a permittee to generally regulate the quality of the water in the body of water into which it discharges pollutants. A divided court said that the EPA, and not the permittee, had the responsibility to determine specific steps a permittee must meet water quality standards. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. In an unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the TikTok ban.

The main issue is whether the rule under which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) regulates ghost guns is consistent with the Gun Control Act (GCA) of 1968. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the OCCA’s ruling, holding that the prosecution’s actions violated Glossip’s right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court affirmed the Second Circuit’s ruling, allowing Horn’s RICO claim for business and property damage resulting from a personal injury. All eyes were on the Supreme Court as it issued the term’s final flurry of opinions, including a lasting win for presidential power with the 6-3 decision to limit the ability of courts to... CNN tracked all of the key Supreme Court cases for the 2024-2025 term, which will likely have far-reaching implications for millions of Americans. The case that limited nationwide injunctions centered on birthright citizenship — which guarantees citizenship to all children born on US soil, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

While the justices’ decision curtailed lower court orders, they also signaled that the president’s controversial plan to effectively end birthright citizenship may never be enforced. The justices also sided on Friday with a group of Maryland parents who want to opt their children out of reading LGBTQ+ books in class for religious reasons. Among the decisions that previously landed is Ames v. Ohio, a lawsuit in which a woman alleged she was discriminated against by her gay boss because she is straight. The court unanimously sided with the plaintiff in early June, making it easier to win “reverse discrimination” suits in some parts of the country. After several years of headline-grabbing decisions that reshaped national political debate—from abortion and affirmative action to religious liberty and presidential power—in its October 2024 Term, the United States Supreme Court largely stepped back from...

The Court issued 56 signed opinions, along with an additional 108 decisions on the “emergency docket.” At the heart of the Term was an unmistakable concern with the limits of judicial and executive authority,... Although the Court remains broadly conservative in orientation, the voting patterns and reasoning this Term suggest a less rigid and more deliberative internal culture than its ideological makeup might suggest. Once again, more than half of the Term’s opinions were unanimous or near-unanimous decisions. The Court’s much-discussed 6-3 conservative majority only infrequently voted as a unified bloc. Instead, the justices increasingly fractured along less predictable lines. A pattern of three loosely aligned groups persisted.

Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson represented a liberal bloc. The remaining justices distinguished themselves from this bloc largely by showing greater fidelity to text and original meaning in matters of constitutional and statutory interpretation. Of these six, Chief Justice Roberts, along with Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett, occupied a more institutional and pragmatic center, while Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch formed a more formal conservative bloc. The result was a term in which the Court’s decisions turned on legal reasoning rather than fixed partisan divisions, and where moderation and minimalism usually prevailed over maximalist ideological ambition. Overall, the Court offered a vision of constitutional governance that favors clear lines, limited discretion, and a return to first principles. Whether in administrative law, civil rights, remedies, or procedure, the Term reflected a Court steadily refining its long-term project: restoring legal order by reinforcing the structures that govern power.

A defining characteristic of the Court this Term was its effort to delineate and reinforce procedural rigor and the essential role courts play in policing the boundaries of litigation and enforcement. Rather than permitting expansive or elastic interpretations of procedural rules that facilitate broad claims or nationwide remedies, the Court emphasized the importance of adherence to clear, predictable, and consistent procedural frameworks. This emphasis reflected the Court’s philosophy that views process not as a mere formality, but as a critical safeguard of fairness, separation of powers, and institutional legitimacy. Throughout the Term, the justices repeatedly underscored that courts must enforce procedural prerequisites with exacting discipline, especially in cases where agencies or litigants attempt to bypass or dilute those rules. Parties and courts may not rewrite or evade procedural frameworks established by Congress or shaped through precedent, for doing so threatens not only judicial efficiency, but the foundational integrity of the judicial process itself. A salient example is Oklahoma v.

EPA, a case that epitomized the Court’s insistence on federalism and procedural propriety in the face of administrative overreach.[1] Here, the EPA sought to consolidate compliance disputes involving more than 20 states’ implementation plans... Circuit, bypassing the localized venues where affected states traditionally litigate.[3] The Court rejected this strategy, emphasizing that the statute’s text and longstanding principles of venue and federalism counsel against such a one-size-fits-all approach.[4] By... In doing so, the Court reinforced the principle that “[v]enue is not a mere technicality”—but “raise[s] deep issues of public policy.”[5] By Adam Liptak, Abbie VanSickle and Alicia Parlapiano The court has concluded announcements of its decisions in this term’s argued cases. One case, on redistricting, will be reargued next term.

The Supreme Court term that started in October got off to a slow start, with a relatively quiet docket that seemed to leave room for litigation arising from the presidential election. Those challenges never came, and the court’s work accelerated. The justices heard arguments on transgender rights; in three major cases on religion in public life; in two cases on efforts to curb gun violence; and in two others on limiting speech on the... After the election of President Trump, the court was also inundated with emergency applications arising from his scores of executive orders. The Supreme Court’s just-finished term featured major rulings as varied as nationwide injunctions on President Donald Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship, gender-transition care for minors, religious liberties, and a bid to create the nation’s... There were multiple fierce clashes among the justices over Trump’s second-term agenda.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a number of decisions of interest to state and territorial governments during its 2024-2025 term. The Court handed down approximately 67 rulings, along with several additional orders addressed through its emergency docket. Among the decided cases, thirteen originated from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit— the highest number from any circuit this term—followed by seven from the Fourth Circuit. Six cases originated from state and district courts.

The merits docket this term featured a range of issues particularly relevant to states and territories. Key issues addressed included the constitutionality of state age-verification laws for minors accessing pornographic content online, restrictions on youth access to gender-affirming care, the scope of state authority in environmental regulation, the inclusion of... This term also saw a notable increase in cases brought before the Court’s emergency docket, commonly known as the shadow docket. From October 7, 2024, to August 9, 2025, the Court received over 110 emergency applications. While the majority of these applications involved death penalty matters or refiling requests, approximately 43 cases raised substantive issues warranting immediate relief. These included critical questions on separation of powers—such as challenges to Courts’ authority to limit executive action—administrative law disputes, First Amendment conflicts, and federalism issues concerning the balance between state and federal authority.

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