Recent articles
July 8, 2026
MAGA has a new villain: Amy Coney Barrett
A new Economist/YouGov poll is a rich text for political observers of the Supreme Court. The Court is unpopular (only 36 percent of American adults approve). It is loathed by Democrats (80 percent ...
www.vox.com
July 3, 2026
The Supreme Court can no longer explain itself
The legal profession is much like a priesthood; both lawyers and theologians interpret a central text, be it the Bible, the Quran, the Gita, or the Constitution. We bury ourselves in canonical comm...
www.vox.com
June 30, 2026
The Supreme Court’s trans sports ruling is a cautionary tale for all left-leaning lawyers
The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that states may bar transgender women from competing on women’s sports teams at secondary schools, colleges, and universities. More than two dozen states have law...
www.vox.com
June 30, 2026
The Supreme Court just came one vote away from a constitutional catastrophe
There is no question in US law that is clearly or more firmly settled than the question of whether people born in the United States are citizens of this country. The Fourteenth Amendment states tha...
www.vox.com
June 29, 2026
The Supreme Court just made Trump the most powerful president in generations
Trump v. Slaughter, one of two “unitary executive” cases that the Supreme Court handed down on Monday, is the culmination of a nearly 40-year fight by Republican judges to expand the powers of the ...
www.vox.com
June 29, 2026
A fringe attack on voting rights just got four votes on the Supreme Court
The premise of the Republican Party’s lawsuit in Watson v. Republican National Committee is that three 19th-century federal laws require thousands of lawfully cast ballots to be tossed in the trash...
www.vox.com
June 25, 2026
The Supreme Court lets Trump deport people back to war zones
The Supreme Court held on Thursday that the Trump administration may ignore procedural rules governing the “temporary protected status” (TPS) program, which allows foreign nationals from war torn o...
www.vox.com
June 25, 2026
The Supreme Court’s embarrassing new Second Amendment decision, explained
On Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii gun law, claiming that it violates the Second Amendment. As is almost always the case in the Court’s Second Amendment decisions, Wolford v. Lopez...
www.vox.com
June 23, 2026
The Supreme Court’s campaign to expand religious liberty now has a glaring exception
A Louisiana prison committed one of the most obvious violations of a man’s religious liberty that has ever made its way to the Supreme Court. Damon Landor is a Rastafari who, for religious reasons...
www.vox.com
June 23, 2026
The Supreme Court is about to decide if children still have free speech rights
It’s not a great time to be a parent. Young people get their information from platforms that did not exist just a few years ago and that many adults have never even heard of. Many parents, who did ...
www.vox.com
June 18, 2026
The Supreme Court has good news for people who like weed and guns
Do you like to smoke marijuana? Do you also enjoy firearms? If so, the Supreme Court has great news for you. On Thursday, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Hemani that the federal governme...
www.vox.com
June 16, 2026
Why the Supreme Court is fighting over deadly gas and firing squads
Last week, the Supreme Court handed an unusual — if temporary — victory to an Alabama man on death row. As Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor, writes, this is the first time in over five yea...
www.vox.com
June 12, 2026
The Supreme Court invented a special legal rule solely to screw Planned Parenthood
About a year ago, the Supreme Court handed down a baffling decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025). In Medina, South Carolina committed an obvious violation of federal Medicaid law, but the...
www.vox.com
June 10, 2026
The next victim of the Supreme Court’s voting rights decision will be workers
President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice released an opinion on Tuesday that, in the likely event it is embraced by a Republican-controlled federal judiciary, would make it significantly hard...
www.vox.com
June 4, 2026
Trump’s attorney general pick has exactly one qualification
In May 2025, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat, arrived at an ICE detention facility in his New Jersey city and asked for a tour. Though he was initially let inside the facility’s gate, he was so...
www.vox.com
June 3, 2026
The Supreme Court’s new decision tilting the midterms toward Republicans, explained
Here’s a familiar story. On Tuesday night, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that will almost certainly give the Republican Party an additional seat in the US House of Representatives. Not a...
www.vox.com
June 2, 2026
Alabama’s new congressional maps do the one thing the Supreme Court still forbids
Allen v. Milligan, an Alabama redistricting case that is now before the Supreme Court for the third time, is a face-palm, wrapped in a head-desk, wrapped in some of the most incompetent legislative...
www.vox.com
May 28, 2026
Brett Kavanaugh just won a surprising victory for racial justice
Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a Republican. He served in a Republican White House, typically votes with the Court’s other Republicans, and even sometimes sides with President Donald Trump in major cas...
www.vox.com
May 26, 2026
A new Supreme Court opinion is terrible news for federal workers
Remember DOGE, the Elon Musk-led “government efficiency” project that spread chaos during President Donald Trump’s first few months back in office, fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and...
www.vox.com
May 21, 2026
The Supreme Court hands a rare victory to a death row inmate
The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it will not decide Hamm v. Smith, a case involving a genuinely difficult constitutional question about whether an Alabama inmate may lawfully be execute...
www.vox.com
May 19, 2026
The Supreme Court just handed down two surprisingly timid Voting Rights Act decisions
On Monday, the Supreme Court decided not to thrust another dagger into the nearly lifeless corpse of the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is arguably the most successful civil right...
www.vox.com
May 19, 2026
Packing the Supreme Court is no longer a fringe idea
Kamala Harris wants to talk about packing the Supreme Court. Last Wednesday, during a video event hosted by the advocacy group Win With Black Women, the former vice president rattled off a long lis...
www.vox.com
May 14, 2026
Mifepristone survives another Supreme Court scare — for now
A common abortion drug survived a second brush with the Supreme Court, leaving it accessible while justices decide its fate in a future ruling. The Court issued a brief order Thursday evening, whic...
www.vox.com
May 12, 2026
Virginia Democrats’ irresponsible new plan to save their gerrymander
If you’re a Democrat, ask yourself a simple question: When was the last time something got better after Brett Kavanaugh put his hands on it? Unfortunately, Jay Jones, the Democratic attorney genera...
www.vox.com
May 8, 2026
The glaring error in the Virginia Supreme Court’s gerrymandering decision
By a 4-3 vote, the Virginia Supreme Court just struck down that state’s recently enacted congressional maps, which were intended to give Democrats four additional seats in the state’s congressional...
www.vox.com
May 7, 2026
Is Trump’s Justice Department trying to discredit itself?
On Wednesday, when FBI agents raided the office of one of the most powerful Democrats in Virginia, Fox News just happened to have one of its Washington-based foreign correspondents on the scene in ...
www.vox.com
May 6, 2026
The Supreme Court broke democracy by saying the quiet part out loud
Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority effectively repealed a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act that required some states to draw a minimum number of majority-Black or majori...
www.vox.com
May 4, 2026
The Supreme Court gets thrown back into the abortion wars
On Friday evening, the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit attempted to cut off access to the abortion drug mifepristone. If you’re experiencing déjà vu, you should be, bec...
www.vox.com
May 4, 2026
What the Supreme Court still has left to decide this term
Being a Supreme Court justice is a pretty sweet gig. The Court typically hears about 60 cases a year, plus a smattering of “shadow docket” cases that receive expedited review. Like schoolchildren, ...
www.vox.com
April 29, 2026
The Voting Rights Act is all but dead. Prepare for maximum gerrymandering.
Get yourself a man who loves you as much as Justice Samuel Alito loves partisan gerrymandering. The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which was handed down on Wednesday, was expecte...
www.vox.com