For sixty years, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been the main legal tool minority voters have to challenge maps that dilute their political power — the thing that forces states to draw a second majority-Black district when residential segregation and racially polarized voting mean one district isn’t enough to give Black voters a real chance to elect anyone. On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court redefined what it takes to win that kind of claim, in a way that Justice Kagan says renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” ...

Grants Pass, Oregon has a population of about 38,000 people and, at last count, nowhere near enough shelter beds for its unhoused residents. The city’s answer to that shortfall wasn’t more beds. It was a set of ordinances that fined people $295 for sleeping outside with so much as a blanket, and jailed repeat offenders — including people who had nowhere else to legally exist. In June 2024, the Supreme Court said that was perfectly constitutional. ...

Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench on June 30, 2026 — a step justices reserve for cases where they want the disagreement on the public record, not just in print. Her summary of what the majority had just done: “the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.” She was describing a ruling that let states ban transgender girls from school sports teams without ever resolving the central factual dispute the case turned on. ...

Federal law caps how much an individual donor can give directly to a candidate at $7,000. That limit exists for an obvious reason: a candidate who owes their campaign to one wealthy check is a candidate who answers to that donor first. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court opened a door around that limit large enough to drive a truck through — by ruling that political parties can spend essentially unlimited amounts in direct coordination with the candidates they’re backing. ...

Most posts on this site are about the Supreme Court taking a right away. This one isn’t — mostly. On June 29, 2026, the Court ruled that “geofence warrants,” the increasingly common police tactic of asking Google to hand over location data for every phone that passed near a crime scene, count as a search under the Fourth Amendment. That means police actually have to get a real warrant, based on real evidence connecting a real suspect to a real crime, before casting the net. It’s a genuine win for digital privacy. It’s also a 6-3 decision, which means three sitting justices were prepared to let the practice continue unchecked — and their reasoning is worth understanding, because it’s the same reasoning that could gut this protection the next time the facts are less sympathetic. ...

For ninety years, a single 1935 precedent stood between the president and total control over the officials who regulate the economy: the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve, the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission. Presidents could not simply fire the people who ran these agencies because they disagreed with a ruling or wanted a loyalist in the seat. Congress built them to be insulated — for cause removal only, not at-will. On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court ended that. And in the very same batch of opinions, it decided the rule didn’t apply to the one agency that matters most to financial markets. ...

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is one sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” It was ratified in 1868. The Supreme Court interpreted it — clearly, and with essentially the meaning everyone has understood it to have for over a century — in 1898. Nobody seriously disputed what it meant for 128 years. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that meaning and struck down Trump’s executive order trying to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented and temporary-visa immigrants. That’s the good news. The bad news is what it took to get there, and what three sitting justices were willing to argue in order to reach the opposite conclusion. ...

The Conflict No One Will Enforce Virginia “Ginni” Thomas is not a private citizen who happened to marry a Supreme Court justice. She is a professional conservative activist who spent months working to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election—texting the White House chief of staff, emailing swing-state legislators, and attending the rally that preceded the January 6 Capitol attack. Her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, then participated in Supreme Court cases directly related to that effort. He was the lone dissenter when the Court allowed the House January 6 Committee to obtain Trump White House documents. He participated in cases involving the immunity of the man whose election her efforts sought to restore. He never recused himself from a single related matter. ...

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has a founding myth. It goes like this: unlike liberal justices who impose their policy preferences onto the Constitution, conservative justices are constrained by the original meaning of the text — what the Founders wrote, what the ratifiers understood. Originalism, in this telling, is not an ideology. It is a discipline. It is the difference between judges who follow the law and judges who make it up. It is a compelling story. It is also, the evidence shows, false. ...

Something has shifted in how Democrats talk about the Supreme Court — and it’s about time. For years, court reform was treated as a fringe idea. Expand the Court? Too radical. Term limits? Too destabilizing. A binding ethics code? Maybe, someday, if we can find the votes. The conventional wisdom held that the Court, however flawed, was too sacred an institution to touch with structural changes. That conventional wisdom is crumbling. And the redistricting and voting rights rulings of the past few months are exactly why. ...

On Tuesday, at a Baker Institute event at Rice University in Houston, Chief Justice John Roberts said something that needed to be said — out loud, in public, with cameras rolling. Personal attacks on judges, he declared, are “dangerous.” “It’s got to stop,” he said. ...

No Explanation. No Vote Count. No Accountability. On March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned, unexplained emergency order keeping New York’s 11th Congressional District map in place — almost certainly through the 2026 midterm elections. A state court had ruled that map unconstitutional because it diluted the voting power of Black and Latino residents. The Supreme Court stepped in and blocked the fix. We don’t know how many justices voted for it. We don’t know what legal standard was applied. We don’t know why the Court acted before New York’s own highest court had a chance to weigh in. We know only the outcome: the Republican-drawn district survives, and the voters whose power it dilutes will have to wait. This is the shadow docket — and this time, it is being used to pick election winners. ...

The Surveillance Grid You Never Voted For: Flock Cameras, ICE, and the Courts’ Failure to Catch Up Sometime in the past few years, a camera appeared on a pole near your home. You probably did not vote on it. Your city council may have approved a contract you never heard about. The company that makes the camera — a Georgia-based firm called Flock Safety — now operates an estimated 80,000 license plate readers across more than 5,000 communities in 49 states. And the data those cameras collect, recording every vehicle that passes with a timestamp and location, is being shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ...

The Supreme Court ruled today — February 20, 2026 — that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not give the President the power to impose tariffs. The vote was 6-3. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority. The Court’s most sweeping executive trade action in modern history has been struck down as unconstitutional overreach. The case is Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, consolidated with V.O.S. Selections v. United States. The ruling vacates the Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariffs — the sweeping duties imposed in April 2025 on imports from dozens of countries — and remands the question of refunds to the U.S. Court of International Trade. More than $160 billion in IEEPA tariff revenue has been collected since January 2025. The fight over who gets it back, and how, is now just beginning. ...

On February 19, 2026, a federal judge in West Virginia released a 21-year-old Salvadoran man from immigration detention and, in doing so, produced one of the most searingly direct opinions in recent American legal history. Anderson Jesus Urquilla-Ramos had come to the United States fleeing violence in El Salvador. He had a pending asylum case. He had valid work authorization. He had a valid driver’s license. On a West Virginia highway, a traffic stop — pretextual, for a license plate cover — became the occasion for his arrest by federal agents who wore masks, carried military-style weapons, drove unmarked vehicles, and presented no warrant of any kind. ...

A Court Divided: LGBTQ Rights and Minority Protections in the Balance The Supreme Court does not move in a straight line. Over the past six years, it has handed down decisions that protected LGBTQ workers from job discrimination, then carved out a constitutional escape hatch for businesses that do not want to serve same-sex couples. It has eliminated the federal right to abortion, while a Justice in the majority hinted that marriage equality might be next. Now a new wave of cases is approaching, and the question is no longer hypothetical: what kind of court is this, and who is it for? ...

On February 19, 1923, the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that declared South Asians ineligible for U.S. citizenship. Nine unelected judges, in a single decision, stripped the legal standing of an entire people from the fabric of American law — and their ruling set off a cascade of consequences that ruined businesses, seized property, and drove at least one man to his death. Today is the 103rd anniversary of that decision. It deserves to be remembered — not just as a historical injustice, but as a precise illustration of why unchecked judicial power is dangerous, why the Court’s institutional consensus is no guarantee of moral correctness, and why structural reform is not optional. ...

Who Owns the Machine’s Work? AI, Copyright, and the Supreme Court’s Coming Reckoning The legal system is struggling to answer a question that would have seemed like science fiction just a decade ago: when an artificial intelligence creates something — a painting, a news article, a piece of code — who owns it? And when an AI system trains itself by reading millions of copyrighted works without permission, has it stolen something? ...

The Supreme Court announced this week that it will begin using conflict-of-interest detection software to identify when justices should recuse themselves from cases. Parties filing before the Court will now be required to list stock ticker symbols in their filings to help the software flag potential conflicts. It sounds like progress. It isn’t—or at least, it isn’t nearly enough. The announcement is the latest example of the Court responding to legitimate ethics crises with the minimum possible action: a technical workaround that avoids confronting the actual problem. The actual problem is that two Supreme Court justices are still holding individual company stocks while deciding cases that affect American corporations, their shareholders, and the broader economy. ...