Forty-five years ago today, President Ronald Reagan announced that he would nominate Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. He formally nominated her the next month, and she was confirmed in September 1981. O’Connor was the first female justice.
Read more Supreme Court allows Texas to enforce law requiring age verification and parental consent on apps
Plus, remember to mark your calendars for Thursday, July 16, when SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe will join Briefly’s Adam Stofsky for a LinkedIn Live event about the most consequential decisions of the 2025-26 term. The livestream will begin at noon EDT. And catch up on what happened during the term by reading our Stat Pack.
At the Court
The Supreme Court on Monday from a youth advocacy organization and trade group to reinstate district court orders barring Texas from enforcing a law requiring parental consent and age verification to download apps from an app store and to buy paid content within an app. For more on the dispute, see the On Site section below.
Morning Reads
In Congress, a bipartisan annoyance with the Supreme Court
Michael Macagnone, Roll Call
The Supreme Court’s recently concluded term left both Republicans and Democrats feeling frustrated. “Conservatives were rankled by a Supreme Court decision quashing President Donald Trump’s effort to limit birthright citizenship, for example. Democrats, meanwhile, were outraged by a decision allowing Trump to fire officials at independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission,” according to Roll Call. However, “Congress is unlikely to pass legislation to respond to this term’s Supreme Court decisions,” in part because Republicans and Democrats do not agree on what needs to be done. And as Roll Call noted, “[e]ven when both parties can agree, congressional rebuke of the Supreme Court is rare.”
Johnson: House GOP ‘looking at all angles’ after Supreme Court birthright citizenship ruling
Max Rego, The Hill
During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, said “his conference is ‘looking at all angles’ to legislatively address birthright citizenship, after the Supreme Court ruled against President Trump’s executive order restricting it,” according to The Hill. “If there’s some legislative fix, we’ll advance that immediately,” Johnson said. “If it’s a constitutional amendment … it takes a little more time. But we’ve got to address this. It really is a serious, serious issue.”
Fifth Circuit Was Again Most Reversed by the US Supreme Court
Jordan Fischer, Bloomberg Law
During the 2025-26 term, the Supreme Court “reversed more decisions out of the” U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit “than any other appellate court – marking the third consecutive time it has topped the reversal list,” according to Bloomberg Law. “Out of 11 merits decisions, the justices reversed arguably the nation’s most conservative appellate court eight times, or in roughly 73% of cases. That’s slightly higher than the overall reversal rate of 70% for the term.” However, the 5th Circuit certainly “wasn’t alone in getting reversed by the justices. Three circuits – the Seventh, Eighth and Eleventh – had a 100% reversal rate at the Supreme Court this year across six cases between them.”
Emil Bove Defended Trump in Court. Then Trump Made Him a Judge.
Mattathias Schwartz, The New York Times
Judge Emil Joseph Bove III, “[a] former personal lawyer for Mr. Trump,” joined the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in September, after time spent “push[ing] hard for Mr. Trump’s policy agenda as a senior official at the Justice Department.” This work, as well as his legal resume – “two clerkships and nine years as a federal prosecutor” – have “driven speculation that Mr. Trump might choose him to fill a potential Supreme Court vacancy.” Given this buzz around Bove, The New York Times spoke with “[s]ome of those who have worked closely with Judge Bove” over the past 10 months about his work ethic, his relationships with his new colleagues, and his approach to administration-related cases. Bove has “shown a knack for persuading others – mostly the court’s five other Trump appointees – to join his opinions. And he has recused himself from political matters he had touched while he was at the Justice Department in early 2025, which legal experts point to as an indication that he is cognizant of his ethical obligations.”
This ‘conservative’ Supreme Court decision could be the left’s friend
Jason Willick, The Washington Post
In a column for The Washington Post, Jason Willick reflected on the significance of Trump v. Slaughter, in which the court affirmed “direct presidential control over regulatory agencies – such as the FTC, the Federal Election Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, [and] the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.” Willick contended that “history shows” that the decision “doesn’t necessarily favor right- or left-leaning policies. … Instead it amplifies the president’s power over regulated companies and therefore the stakes of winning the White House for both parties.”
On Site
Supreme Court allows Texas to enforce law requiring age verification and parental consent on apps
By Amy Howe
The court on Monday allowed Texas to continue to enforce, at least for now, a law that requires app stores to verify its buyers’ ages and obtain parental consent for minors to download apps and to purchase paid content within those apps. In a pair of brief, unsigned orders issued on Monday afternoon, the justices turned down requests to reinstate orders by a federal judge in Austin that barred the state from implementing the law. There were no public dissents from the orders.
The justices remained busy last summer. This year, will they actually get a break?
By Kelsey Dallas
Last year’s summer recess was not a typical one for the justices. They handled several significant matters on the court’s interim or emergency docket, addressing requests from the Trump administration to, among other things, be allowed to reduce the size of the federal workforce and terminate $800 million in grants. Will this summer be quieter?
Is the Roberts court hyperopic or willfully blind?
By Michael Dorf
In a column for SCOTUSblog, Michael Dorf reflected on what we learned during the 2025-26 term about the conservative super-majority’s relationship to the Trump administration. The conservative justices, overall, appeared to be “blind to the consequences of handing ever more power to an authoritarian president,” he wrote.
The powerful, resilient, independent Supreme Court
By Jack Goldsmith
In a column for SCOTUSblog, Jack Goldsmith contended that the court is successfully navigating threats to its authority posed by the Trump administration. “One can disagree with many of the Supreme Court decisions since Jan. 20, 2025. … But the fact is that the court’s strategy has preserved and possibly enhanced its authority vis-à-vis the president and has resulted in the successful enforcement of significant legal constraints on the presidency, all in the face of a nearly unprecedented set of challenges,” he wrote.
Podcasts
Smart Microwave
Dan Epps and Will Baude discuss Chatrie v. United States, the court’s first major Fourth Amendment decision in years. They trace how the geofence-warrant ruling builds on – and goes beyond – Katz v. United States, United States v. Jones, and Carpenter v. United States, and what’s left of the third-party doctrine and the mosaic theory.
Read more The justices remained busy last summer. This year, will they actually get a break?
The Justices and Summer
The justices, like all of us, want (and dare we say need?) some time off after the last opinion of the term drops in argued cases. But the nine justices don’t quite get to pack their bags and peace out until early October. In the time that the justices do get away from One First Street, some travel far from the capital and others take up fascinating hobbies.
First, a bit of necessary context. Cert petitions are filed with the court over the entire year and do not pause for a summer break. Near the start of each new term, the court convenes for the “long conference,” a single large session at which the justices work through all the petitions that accumulated while they were on recess. So even as the justices disperse, a steady stream of cert petitions (and the corresponding memos from their clerks) follow them.
Then there is the emergency docket, which in recent years, has become a serious complication to the ideal summer recess. In July 2024, Justice Elena Kagan said at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit’s annual judicial conference that summers were no longer what they had been. “Our summers used to actually be summers,” she said, remarking that the pace of emergency applications had turned what was once a semi-break into something more like a compressed term. By the end of that same summer, the court had issued rulings on 26 emergency applications since adjourning. The summer of 2025 ended up being even busier: from July to October, the court issued 42 substantive orders, compared to 15 over the same window in 2021.
But those obligations are only half the story, since the justices do get to leave Washington at some point. Here are a few of the more notable travels:
Justice David Souter, who served from 1990 until his retirement in June 2009, was somewhat famous for his summer travel. Per a former clerk, “as soon as the Court broke for the holidays or summer recess, [Souter] was gone – [he] would get in his old VW Rabbit and drive nonstop back to his beloved New Hampshire.” In Weare, New Hampshire, was the farmhouse he grew up in. The farmhouse, which had belonged to his grandparents, was so packed with books that the structure eventually became a concern – Souter would later tell a neighbor that the old two-story building was no longer sound enough to support the weight of his library, and he relocated to a home in nearby Hopkinton.
Justice Clarence Thomas takes a different approach. Beginning in 1999, Thomas and his wife began spending their summers crisscrossing the United States in a 40-foot RV, often sleeping in Walmart parking lots along the way. “We have found it’s a wonderful life,” Ginni Thomas told NPR in 2009.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s summers, meanwhile, had opera as an organizing principle. She attended the annual Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York for nine summers. She was also a regular presence at the Santa Fe Opera, and in the summer of 2017 attended a Q&A following a performance of the opera “Scalia/Ginsburg,” which dramatized her decades-long friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia, at Glimmerglass.
Teaching abroad has also become something of a tradition for several justices. Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Ginsburg, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and Samuel Alito at various points taught in study-abroad programs at sites including Germany, Portugal, Ireland, Switzerland, Panama, Hawaii, Prague, London, Galway, and Malta. Kennedy taught at a summer program in Austria at the University of Salzburg for almost three decades, and Kavanaugh taught near London in 2019.
Justice Neil Gorsuch has spent multiple summers in Padua, Italy, and Reykjavik, Iceland, co-teaching a separation of powers seminar through George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, and in 2021, Kagan joined him in Iceland as a guest lecturer. Gorsuch appears to be teaching in Prague this summer. In summer 2024, Roberts headed to Galway, Ireland for a class on Supreme Court history, while Gorsuch traveled to Porto, Portugal, for another two-week seminar. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will be speaking this summer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s travels have previously included Ireland and Rome.
As Kagan said to the 9th Circuit in 2024, the justices’ recess was once structured so they could step back “before we went back to the hothouse of decision-making.” We’ll see if that holds true this summer.
SCOTUS Quote
JUSTICE ALITO: “Well, when I was on the court of appeals we thought it was our responsibility to ensure that the district courts were complying with the Sentencing Reform Act. That might not have been true across the river, but –“
Read more The powerful, resilient, independent Supreme Court
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: “It wasn’t.”
— (2013)