Supreme Court Opens Term Loaded With Divisive Cases
The U.S. Supreme Court formally opens its new term on Monday, Oct. 5, with a docket stacked with high-stakes cases on climate change, religion, gun rights and immigration — and, waiting in the wings, disputes over election law. According to NPR, the term promises another year of consequential rulings that could reshape American law on deeply divisive issues.
The court’s opening case tests whether state and local governments can sue energy companies for allegedly deceiving the public about the damaging effects of fossil fuels. Boulder County and the City of Boulder will argue the case against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy on Monday morning, the first argument of the fall term.
A Climate Case With Broad Reach
The Boulder lawsuit, originally filed in April 2018, seeks to hold the oil companies responsible for harms the plaintiffs say result from knowingly contributing to climate change while concealing the dangers of their products. Since 2018, the case has survived repeated attempts by the companies to move or dismiss it, and in May 2025 the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that federal law did not preempt Boulder’s claims.
“The theory is that the energy company defendants deceived the public for many years,” Harvard Law School’s Deepak Gupta told NPR, describing what the companies told the public as “the opposite of what the company’s own scientists knew, and the local cost of that deception.”
According to a Boulder County press release, the county is represented by Kevin Russell of Russell & Woofter LLC, with the plaintiffs’ team including attorneys from EarthRights International. The companies claim federal law shields them from all accountability for climate harms. If the court rules for the companies, the decision could invalidate dozens of similar municipal and state suits against the fossil fuel industry.
Religion and the Funding of Religious Schools
Perhaps the biggest case of the term so far, in terms of ripple effects, involves religion — a subject on which the court’s conservative supermajority has dramatically shifted legal doctrine. For much of a century, the court emphasized the First Amendment’s separation of church and state, with free exercise playing an important but secondary role.
“It’s literally the opposite of what the law was not that long ago, and it’s just a complete shift,” Michigan State University law professor Frank Ravitch told NPR.
At issue in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, argued Nov. 3, is whether a Colorado Catholic preschool can access state “universal preschool” funding while refusing to admit LGBTQ students or children of LGBTQ parents. As SCOTUSblog reported, the preschool argues its exclusion from the program amounts to religious discrimination, while the state contends its rules are neutral and apply to all preschools regardless of religion.
Last term the justices deadlocked 4-4 on a similar question after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, leaving in place a bar on taxpayer-funded religious charter schools. With Barrett participating this time, the court could require taxpayers to fund religious schools that refuse to admit LGBTQ students and parents.
The AR-15 Question
In December, the court will hear a case testing whether state and local bans on semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15 violate the Second Amendment. SCOTUSblog reported that the justices will hear Viramontes v. Cook County, consolidated with Grant v. Higgins, on Dec. 2.
AR-15-style bans exist in about a dozen states, and a nationwide ban lapsed in 2004. Former Solicitor General Don Verrilli Jr. told NPR that an AR-15 “can deliver upwards of 100 bullets per minute” without enhancements, but noted millions of Americans own them, “and it would be quite disruptive to suggest all these Americans … would be dispossessed of their weapons.”
Lawyer Erin Murphy, who has litigated cases on behalf of gun owners, framed the issue bluntly: “The single most important question is who gets to decide what guns you have.”
Immigration and Mandatory Detention
The Trump administration has repeatedly taken immigration positions no prior administration adopted. The court announced just days before the term opened that it will decide Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha, a challenge to the administration’s policy of detaining undocumented immigrants without bond hearings regardless of how long they have lived in the country.
As CBS News reported, the case centers on Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a Brazilian citizen who came to the U.S. more than 20 years ago, was never convicted of a crime and had been granted a work permit. He was taken into custody during a traffic stop and denied a bond hearing. A federal appeals court later called the policy the “broadest mass-detention-without-bond mandate in our nation’s history.”
The court will also weigh a case on indefinite detention of immigrants with criminal histories and another on asylum-status immigrants seeking green cards. Arguments on the administration’s third-country deportation policy are set for December.
The Expanding Emergency Docket
Beyond its argued cases, the term is notable for an expanding “emergency docket” through which the administration has sought rapid relief with a high success rate. Decisions on the emergency docket are rendered quickly, with little briefing, no oral arguments and little or no explanation.
Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck told NPR that the number of emergency appeals has ballooned while fully briefed and argued cases have dropped precipitously. “So now we have twice as many full court rulings on emergency applications as we have on the merits docket,” he said. “That is a very new phenomenon.”
According to a Brennan Center tracker, the court has issued 32 decisions on the shadow docket concerning administration actions since January 2025 — 24 of them ruling for the administration at least partially. TIME reported that the administration made 41 such requests in Trump’s first term and has already matched that number in the second, far outpacing the three submitted by President Obama and 19 by President Biden.
Critics — including the court’s liberal justices and some conservatives — have raised alarms. “The rise of the emergency. The perpetual emergency. Everything is an emergency,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said in Colorado Springs last week, per TIME. “I just don’t think that’s a recipe for a healthy democracy over the long term.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has warned that “if we’re not careful, the emergency docket can and will become an end-run around the standard review process.” The Justice Department defends the practice, telling TIME that without timely relief, “any administration’s priorities could be tied up in litigation for years.”
Election Law and What Comes Next
Multiple election-related disputes may reach the court before the November midterms. An analysis by Yahoo News notes that a dozen states already require proof of citizenship to register, and the court will consider Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship law in Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota. Research cited in the analysis estimates as many as 21 million Americans lack documents proving citizenship.
The court has already intervened in election disputes this fall, blocking a Trump-backed Missouri congressional map in September while declining to allow restrictions on mail-in ballots ahead of the midterms.
In September alone, the court sided with the administration on third-country deportations, permitted use of a disputed DHS database to verify voter eligibility and allowed the withholding of $4 billion in foreign aid.
Other cases waiting in the wings include a bid to reverse a 1980 precedent barring Ten Commandments displays in public schools, a challenge to state regulation of the prediction-market firm Kalshi, and disputes involving Harvard research grants and law firm security clearances.
As Stanford law professor Pam Karlan told NPR, the administration’s posture reflects a tension: officials “don’t want to take up cases that they’re going to lose, but on the other hand, they have a boss who wants everything taken up there.”
Vladeck cautioned that the biggest rulings may not yet be visible. “The real story of the upcoming term hasn’t been written yet,” he said, “because what we’re going to look back on as the biggest cases of the term … are not on the docket yet.”