Major Supreme Court Cases from the 2025–26 Term
In which case will the Supreme Court decide whether Pres. Donald Trump is authorized to issue tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)?
What is the question presented in Trump v. Barbara?
What legal issue is at the center of Louisiana v. Callais?
What is the focus of the case Chiles v. Salazar?
In which case will the Supreme Court decide whether the leadership of the Federal Trade Commission and other independent agencies can be fired without cause?
What is being challenged in Little v. Hecox?
The Supreme Court of the United States is hearing a number of significant cases in its 2025–26 term, which began on October 6, 2025, and will end in late June or early July 2026. By early October 2025, the Court had agreed to hear 39 cases (only 19 of which were then scheduled for oral argument) while it continued to evaluate numerous petitions for review. Among the questions presented in the accepted cases to date are: whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 allows a U.S. president to impose tariffs on other countries; whether a state’s creation of a second Black-majority congressional district is justified under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whether a state law prohibiting counselors or therapists from performing gender conversion therapy for children violates the right to freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment; whether a state law prohibiting transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s sports violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s right to equal protection under the law; and whether the legislative protection of leaders of independent agencies against removal without cause violates the constitutional separation of powers.
Below are details of five major cases that have been or will be argued before the Supreme Court during its 2025–26 term.
Learning Resources v. Trump (tariffs)
Summary
The case, argued on November 5, 2025, concerns the question of whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977 “authorizes the President to impose tariffs.”
Oral arguments before the Court
The defendants in the consolidated case, including small businesses and 12 states, argued that such tariffs are not justified because: (1) they are nowhere mentioned in the IEEPA, (2) no other president has attempted to impose tariffs under the IEEPA, and (3) in the past 238 years Congress has always delegated such powers “explicitly, always with real limits.” Defendants also argued that U.S. Pres. Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs was in violation of the Supreme Court’s “major questions doctrine,” according to which a president may exercise important powers delegated by Congress only if those powers are specifically identified in relevant legislation.
The solicitor general, representing President Trump, argued in part that large U.S. trade deficits and the smuggling of opioids into the country had created economic and national security emergencies, justifying significant tariffs on other countries. He also insisted that the IEEPA’s delegation of the power to “regulate…importation” in response to declared emergencies must encompass tariffs, because tariffs are a standard means of regulating importation.
Questions and comments from the Court
“Can you point to any other place in the Code [IEEPA] or any other time in history where that phrase…‘regulate importation’ has been used to confer tariff-imposing authority?” —Justice Amy Coney Barrett
“Wouldn’t you agree that statutes that confer on the President real emergency powers are often phrased much more broadly than other statutes? Isn’t that the very nature of an emergency?” —Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
Most justices appeared skeptical of the solicitor general’s arguments, questioning not only whether the IEEPA authorized presidents to invoke tariffs but also whether tariffs were a form of taxation—in which case, under the Constitution, presidents could not invoke them. Skeptical members of the Court also joined Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in suggesting that Trump’s interpretation of the IEEPA was probably in violation of the major questions doctrine.
Some justices, however, appeared to favor Trump’s position in their questions and comments. Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., for example, suggested that it is reasonable to assume that under an “imminent threat of war” the president would have the power to invoke a tariff on “a very powerful enemy whose economy was heavily dependent on U.S. trade.” And Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked whether it made sense to interpret the IEEPA as prohibiting “a 1 percent tariff” while allowing the president to completely suspend trade with another country in the event of a national emergency. Notably, Justice Amy Coney Barrett was critical of both sides of the case.
Background
In February and April 2025 President Trump issued a series of executive orders that together imposed tariffs on products imported from nearly all other countries. Related orders by Trump reduced, increased, extended, or lifted tariffs for certain countries and products. In the orders themselves Trump claimed that as president of the United States he possessed the authority to impose tariffs under a set of laws including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977, which enables presidents to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat…to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States,” provided that a corresponding “national emergency” is declared. In the first of two groups of executive orders, Trump imposed what came to be known as trafficking tariffs upon Canada, Mexico, and China for having failed to “stem the tide” of “illicit drugs” and upon Mexico for “unlawful migration” into the United States, both of which “threaten the fabric of our society.” In the second and much larger group of orders, Trump imposed reciprocal tariffs of 10 to 50 percent upon countries throughout the world. In April, two Illinois-based educational child-toy companies, Learning Resources, Inc., and hand2mind, Inc., whose products were manufactured in other countries, filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, arguing that the IEEPA did not authorize the president to impose tariffs and requesting a preliminary injunction of Trump’s orders. In the same month, the Court of International Trade (CIT) agreed to hear two other suits against Trump’s tariffs, one by a group of five businesses and another by Oregon and 11 other states. In May the district court agreed with the plaintiffs that the IEEPA did not grant Trump the power to impose unlimited tariffs at will and issued a preliminary injunction. The CIT issued a similar ruling (though without an injunction) in the same month, and in August the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CFC) rejected Trump’s appeal of that case. The Supreme Court then granted Trump’s request for an expedited review of the CFC’s decision, scheduling oral arguments for November 5, 2025.
Louisiana v. Callais (the Voting Rights Act)
Summary
The case, argued on October 15, 2025, concerns the question of whether Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-minority congressional district “violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
Oral arguments before the Court
The plaintiffs in the consolidated case, representing voters in a second Black-majority voting district in Louisiana that was created in 2024, disputed the finding of a district court that the race-based creation of the second district amounted to an act of racial gerrymandering against “non-African American” citizens, in violation of both the Fourteenth Amendment—which guarantees equal protection under the law—and the Fifteenth Amendment—which prohibits the denial of the right to vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The creation of the second district had been ordered by another district court in 2022, in keeping with its finding that the voting power of Louisiana’s Black population had likely been diluted in the redistricting conducted after the 2020 national census, which was in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Only one of the six districts contained a Black majority, despite the fact that one-third of the state’s population was Black. The plaintiffs cited as precedent the Supreme Court’s own decision in Allen v. Milligan (2023), which agreed with a district court in Alabama that the state’s redistricting map had violated the same Section 2.
The solicitor general of Louisiana urged the Court to “reevaluate its voting precedents” in light of the state’s contention that “Section 2, insofar as it requires race-based redistricting, is unconstitutional.” The problems created by the continued enforcement of that provision, he insisted, “have placed states in impossible situations where the only sure demand is more racial discrimination for more decades.” He thus invited the Court to eliminate Section 2 altogether.
Questions and comments from the Court
“What Section 2 does is to say, where…African Americans…are not being given the same voting opportunities as white people are, then a remedy is appropriate. That remedy doesn’t have to be race-based, but sometimes it is race-based in order to correct the racially…discriminatory situation that exists in the state right now.” —Justice Elena Kagan
“It is necessary to bear in mind that redistricting must comply with the overriding demands of the Equal Protection Clause.” —Justice Brett Kavanaugh
The conservative justices appeared skeptical of the plaintiffs’ arguments, questioning their reading of Section 2 and the provision’s ultimate compatibility with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. Chief Justice Roberts, who had written the Court’s majority opinion in Allen v. Milligan, seemed to dispute its status as a decisive precedent for the current case, noting that “we were considering Alabama’s particular challenge based on…what turned out to be an improper evidentiary showing.” Justice Kavanaugh then suggested that Section 2 might not have justified the creation of a second Black-majority district, because “this Court’s cases in a variety of contexts have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a long period of time…but that they should not be indefinite and should have an end point.” He also contended that if Louisiana’s opposition to a new majority-minority district was based on politics rather than race, it would not count as a violation of Section 2, as the Trump administration had argued in its brief.
In contrast, the liberal justices seemed to side with the plaintiffs. In response to Roberts’s comparison of the current case with Allen v. Milligan, for example, Justice Elena Kagan told the Louisiana solicitor general that “when we decided Milligan…the state there made several arguments that we specifically rejected. And in the answers that you just gave to me, it seems to me that you repeated each and every one of those arguments that we rejected.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also countered Kavanaugh’s point regarding the supposed time limit of Section 2 by claiming that the provision “is not a remedy in and of itself” but rather “just the measure by which we determine that a remedy is required,” and for that reason the provision does not need a time limit: “It’s not doing any work other than just pointing us to the direction of where we might need to do something.”
Background
In 2022 a federal district court ordered the Louisiana state legislature to redraw the congressional district map it had created after the national census of 2020, on the ground that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by effectively limiting the voting power of the state’s Black population. In that map, only one of the state’s six congressional districts contained a Black majority, despite the fact that approximately one-third of the state’s population was Black. Soon afterward the Supreme Court stayed the district court’s order pending its own decision in a similar case originating in Alabama. In 2023, after finding Alabama’s redistricting to have violated Section 2, the Court lifted its stay of the Louisiana order, allowing the state’s legislature in 2024 to create a new map with two Black-majority districts. Later that year, however, another district court in the state ruled that the creation of the second Black district was an act of racial gerrymandering in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and it ordered the state legislature not to use the map in the 2024 election. The Supreme Court then stayed that court’s order pending its own hearing of the case during its 2024–25 term, thus ensuring Louisiana’s use of the map. Remarkably, the Court was unable to reach a decision by late June, and it announced that it would reschedule the case for its 2025–26 term. The Court then ordered the parties in the case to file briefs addressing the question, “whether [Louisiana’s] intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
Chiles v. Salazar (conversion therapy)
Summary
The case, argued on October 7, 2025, concerns the question of whether “a law that censors certain conversations between counselors and their clients based on the viewpoints expressed regulates conduct or violates the Free Speech Clause” of the First Amendment.
Oral arguments before the Court
The plaintiff in the case, a licensed counselor and practicing Christian in Colorado, challenged the state’s ban on subjecting minors to conversion therapy—the use of various methods to change a person’s gender identity to match their biological sex or to convert a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexuality. As a Christian counselor, the plaintiff believes that one’s biological sex and heterosexual orientation reflect the will of God and should therefore be accepted. She contended that the law prevented her from helping minors accept their God-given identities and orientations, in clear violation of her right to free speech and the free exercise of religion under the First Amendment. She also emphasized that she afforded such therapy only to minors who wished to align to their biological gender identity or to heterosexual orientation.
The solicitor general of Colorado argued in response that the bipartisan law was not unconstitutional because its purpose was not to regulate the counselor’s speech or her religious practices but to protect minors against a therapeutic practice that had no basis in science and was often psychologically harmful to young people. The solicitor general argued that conversion therapy only incidentally involved speech and that the counselor’s religious practices were not significantly affected.
Questions and comments from the Court
“So, in the first situation, an adolescent male comes to a licensed therapist and says he’s attracted to other males, but he…wants to end or lessen [those feelings], and he asks for the therapist’s help in doing so.…[In] the other situation is a similar adolescent male…and he wants the therapist’s help so he will feel comfortable as a gay young man. It seems to me…your statute dictates opposite results in those two situations…based on the viewpoint expressed.…Looks like blatant viewpoint discrimination.” —Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
“It seems very odd that you could have two scenarios where you have two licensed professionals both attempting to provide treatment to an individual.…Under your theory, those two scenarios are sufficiently different from a constitutional perspective that one could be allowed and the other not?” —Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
Most members of the Supreme Court appeared to be skeptical of Colorado’s claim that the state’s law banning conversion therapy for minors did not violate the counselor’s rights to freedom of speech or the free exercise of religion. Among the issues discussed by the Court was whether the counselor lacked legal standing to sue Colorado, given that she would not face prosecution for her type of conversion therapy, as the state had already announced. Another issue concerned whether it made sense to allow a type of conversion therapy based on talk while prohibiting a type based on medication, only because the latter would not necessarily involve speech on the part of the therapist. Such a distinction was questioned by Justice Jackson, as she informed the counsel representing the plaintiff. She argued that the purpose of the law under review was simply to prohibit a therapy harmful to minors, no matter how it is exercised, and not to regulate the speech of conversion therapists. Justice Alito disagreed with that perspective, declaring at one point that the law discriminated against the viewpoint that conversion therapy should not be allowed for minors who wish to identify with their biological sex or reestablish their heterosexuality.
Background
In 2019 the Colorado General Assembly passed the Minor Conversion Therapy Law (MCTL), which prohibits licensed counselors and mental health professionals from subjecting minors to conversion therapy, understood as the use of various methods to change a person’s gender identity to match their biological sex or to convert a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexuality. The most common form of conversion therapy involves “talk” between associated providers and their subjects. Other forms have included cognitive or behavioral therapies, such as hypnosis or the teaching of conventional behaviors associated with the targeted gender; medical treatments based on hormones or surgeries; and religion-based instruction aimed at convincing subjects that their sexuality is not in keeping with their religion’s morality, values, or ideals. MCTL, as well as similar laws in more than 20 other states, was adopted in response to numerous studies by experts showing that conversion therapy has no serious scientific basis and is often harmful to children. (Indeed, it has been connected to childhood depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, substance use disorder, and even suicide.) In 2022 conversion therapist Kaley Chiles, who described herself as a practicing Christian, requested a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the MCTL, arguing that the law violated her First Amendment rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion. The district court denied her request, holding that Chiles had failed to show that she would likely succeed in a legal challenge against the state, given that the focus of the MCTL—the conduct of conversion therapists—only incidentally involved speech and that the prohibition of such conduct only incidentally burdened the free exercise of religion. After the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit refused to reverse the district court’s ruling, Chiles filed a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case in its 2025–26 term.
Trump v. Slaughter (independent federal agencies)
Summary
The case, argued on December 8, 2025, concerns the following questions:
- whether “the statutory removal protections for members of the Federal Trade Commission violate the separation of powers”;
- whether Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), in which the Supreme Court held that the Federal Trade Commission Act (1914) prohibited the removal of commission members for any reason other than “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” should be overruled; and
- whether “a federal court may prevent a person’s removal from public office.”
Oral arguments before the Court
The plaintiff in the case, Pres. Donald Trump (as represented by the solicitor general), argued that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which upheld removal protections for members of the FTC, was an “outlier” whose reasoning had been significantly qualified (“gutted and refurbished”) in several later Court decisions. The Court’s continued acceptance of FTC removal protections was no longer based on its earlier findings that the Constitution does not give the president “illimitable power of removal” and that the functions of the FTC were only “quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.” The Court focused instead on the tenure and administrative authority of protected members and, in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the leadership structure of the independent agency. The solicitor general argued that, because the refuted reasoning in Humphrey’s “continues to generate confusion in the lower courts,” thus tempting Congress to construct “a headless fourth branch,” the decision “must be overruled.”
The legal counsel representing the FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter noted in response that Trump’s firing of Slaughter without cause was an unquestionable violation of the FTC Act, as the Court had “authoritatively construed” the law for 90 years. In addition, “the President’s constitutional duty to execute the law does not give him the power to violate that law with impunity.” The counsel also declared that “multi-member commissions with members enjoying some kind of removal protection have been part of our story since 1790.” It follows that, if Trump’s legal team is right,
- “all three branches of government have been wrong from the start,”
- “Congress and prior Presidents have been wrong to jointly create early founding-era commissions and more than two dozen traditional independent agencies since 1887,” and
- “this Court was wrong to repeatedly bless those laws.”
Given that the president’s position would destroy all such “history and precedent,” his petitioners would require “an air-tight theory to justify the radical change that they now seek.” According to the counsel, “they don’t have one.”
Questions and comments from the Court
“Isn’t it problematic…that what this is going to amount to at the end of the day is putting not only all executive power in the President but an incredible amount of legislative [or] rulemaking power and judging in the President’s hands?” —Justice Elena Kagan
“I think broad delegations to unaccountable independent agencies raise enormous constitutional and real-world problems for individual liberty.” —Justice Brett Kavanaugh
The conservative justices of the Court were noticeably skeptical of the arguments in favor of retaining job protections for commissioners of the FTC and members of other independent agencies. A variety of potential objections were discussed, including:
- permitting congressional control of the FTC would effectively enable Congress to take control of Cabinet-level departments or create new independent agencies within the executive branch,
- independent agencies are “not accountable to the people,” and
- in the words of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., the Court’s decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States is now just a “dried husk” of what it was thought to be, because “the powers of the agency” at the time “have nothing to do with what the FTC looks like today.”
The liberal justices defended the job protections of the FTC and other independent agencies by contending that the legitimate goals of the legislation establishing the agencies could not be realized without the sustained guidance of expert or experienced commissioners. If presidents were able to remove or replace commissioners at will, they could effectively cancel standing legislation or create their own laws, in obvious violation of the separation of powers.
A related dispute concerned whether the Court’s removal of job protections for independent agencies could be coherently formulated in a way that would preserve the necessary independence of the Federal Reserve System. While the solicitor general contended that the Federal Reserve is a “unique and distinct” entity that would not be affected by the Court’s decision, Justice Elena Kagan warned that, “once you’re down this road, it’s a little bit hard to see how you stop.”
Background
In 2018, during his first presidential term (2017–21), Donald Trump nominated Rebecca Slaughter, an aide to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, to the leadership of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an independent agency responsible for ensuring fair business competition and protecting consumers against business fraud. Upon her confirmation by the Senate, Slaughter joined the FTC as one of five commissioners serving staggered seven-year terms. In 2023 she was nominated to a second term by Democratic president Joe Biden (2021–25). After only two years in office, however, she was fired by Trump at the start of his own second term (2025– ). Slaughter then challenged her firing in the federal district court of Washington, D.C., arguing that, under the longstanding reading of the law establishing the FTC—the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTCA) of 1914—the president cannot remove a commissioner for any reason other than inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. Trump, however, had declared to Slaughter that he was firing her only because her continued presence on the FTC would be “inconsistent” with the priorities of his administration. In July 2025, after the district court sided with Slaughter and ordered her reinstatement, Trump asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to pause the order while his appeal proceeded. A panel of the appeals court denied Trump’s request, citing a 90-year-old ruling of the Supreme Court, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), which rejected Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s removal of an FTC commissioner in 1933. Roosevelt had justified the removal as necessary to effectively carry out the “aims and purposes” of his administration. In October 2025 the Court granted Trump’s request to pause the appeals court’s ruling and agreed to hear the case on December 8.
Little v. Hecox (transgender athletes)
This case is scheduled to be argued before the Supreme Court on January 13, 2026.
Background
In March 2020 the Idaho state legislature passed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which prohibited transgender girls and women from participating in sporting events for females at Idaho public schools and universities. Several other states later adopted similar laws whose declared purpose was to prevent female sports teams from gaining an unfair advantage over others by replacing their members with transgender girls or women and to ensure that female students are given a fair chance to qualify for and participate in girls’ and women’s sports. In April 2020 Lindsay Hecox and others, including a cisgender student, challenged the Idaho law in federal district court, arguing that it violated both Title IX of the 1972 Federal Education Amendments, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education programs, and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires that people in similar situations be treated similarly under the law. Finding that the plaintiffs were likely to win the case, the court enjoined the law’s enforcement pending its own decision. After the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the district court’s injunction on the basis of the equal protection clause, the state of Idaho filed a petition for review with the Supreme Court, which was granted in July 2025. On the same day, the Court also agreed to hear a parallel case from another state, West Virginia v. B.J.P. The question presented in Little v. Hecox is: “whether laws that seek to protect women’s and girls’ sports by limiting participation to women and girls based on sex violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The questions presented in West Virginia v. B.J.P. are: “whether Title IX prevents a state from consistently designating girls’ and boys’ sports teams based on biological sex determined at birth” and “whether the Equal Protection Clause prevents a state from offering separate boys’ and girls’ sports teams based on biological sex determined at birth.”
In early November 2025 the Supreme Court declined to hear a case involving a challenge to its earlier ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), written by Justice Anthony Kennedy (now retired), which established that state bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. The petitioner in that case, a county clerk in Kentucky, had argued unsuccessfully in lower courts that her state’s requirement that she issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples violated her right to the free exercise of religion under the First Amendment.
Trump v. Barbara (birthright citizenship)
This case, which has not yet been scheduled for argument before the Supreme Court, concerns the question of whether Pres. Donald Trump’s executive order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which declared an end to birthright citizenship (jus soli) in the United States, “complies on its face with the Citizenship Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) and with legislation from 1952 in which the citizenship clause was codified.
Background
Trump’s executive order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” issued on the first day of his second presidential term (2025– ), prohibits the federal government from granting American citizenship to a person born in the United States whose biological parents were not American citizens or legally permanent residents at the time of the person’s birth. The order thus rejected the traditional interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, which declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Trump’s order claimed that the original purpose of the citizenship clause was only to guarantee American citizenship to formerly enslaved persons and their children; therefore, it should not be read as also granting citizenship to children born to “illegal aliens” or temporary residents. Trump’s order was challenged in several lawsuits and soon blocked in nationwide injunctions issued by three federal district court judges, each of whom found the order to be obviously or at least probably unconstitutional. In response, the Trump administration first asked the Supreme Court to rule on the question of whether district courts were capable of issuing nationwide injunctions prohibiting enforcement of particular federal laws or policies. After the Court found that nationwide injunctions in cases involving small numbers of plaintiffs “exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts,” lower courts issued new nationwide injunctions in suits filed by states, organizations, and plaintiffs representing entire classes of individuals. In September 2025 the Trump administration filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking for review of a New Hampshire district court’s nationwide injunction, this time in consideration of the proper interpretation of the citizenship clause. In December the Court agreed to hear the case in its 2025–26 term.