Articles Tagged: Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court has left in place its earlier stay in People Not Politicians v. Onder, preserving the status quo in a closely watched fight over which Missouri congressional map will govern the 2026 election cycle. While the docket entry is procedural, the practical effect is significant: the Court is continuing to block lower-court action that could have altered the state’s election framework on an accelerated timetable.
The dispute sits at the convergence of three recurring pressure points in election litigation: state ballot and referendum rules, the realities of election administration, and the Supreme Court’s growing willingness to intervene through its emergency docket when timing becomes critical.
A federal appeals panel has upheld Missouri’s challenged congressional map, delivering a near-term win for state officials and supporters of the plan, including allies of former President Donald Trump. But the ruling is unlikely to end the fight. With the November 2026 election cycle approaching, the litigation appears headed toward possible U.S. Supreme Court review, keeping Missouri in the center of a broader legal debate over how and when courts should intervene in redistricting disputes.
At a high level, the case reflects a familiar but increasingly consequential pattern in election litigation: challengers argue that a map is unlawful, while state officials respond that late-breaking court intervention risks disrupting election administration.
The U.S. Supreme Court has granted emergency relief to Republican campaign committees in a dispute over political advertising rates, allowing them to pursue lower-cost broadcast time ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The ruling removes a significant practical obstacle for national party committees seeking to take advantage of advertising rates that can dramatically affect campaign budgets in the final stretch before voting.
At issue is who qualifies for the federally regulated “lowest unit rate” for broadcast advertising during the pre-election window.
The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in on an emergency basis and revive a federal mail-ballot restriction that a lower federal court had blocked ahead of the November midterm elections. The application places the dispute on the Court’s fast-track emergency docket, where timing often matters as much as the merits—especially in election cases unfolding close to voting deadlines.
At a high level, the administration is seeking to undo an order that prevented enforcement of a new federal rule governing mail ballots.
The Supreme Court has declined to review Donald Trump’s effort to undo the civil verdict in favor of writer E. Jean Carroll, leaving intact the $5 million judgment entered after a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The denial leaves the Second Circuit’s decision in place and effectively ends this round of appellate review in one of the most closely watched personal-liability cases involving a president.
The petition came in Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, Petitioner v. E. Jean Carroll, following appellate proceedings that preserved the trial result.
The Justice Department has secured a major sentence against one of the legal profession’s most recognizable figures: prominent appellate advocate Thomas C. Goldstein was sentenced to 72 months in prison for tax crimes and mortgage fraud, and his bond was revoked. The case stands out not only because of the sentence, but because Goldstein argued more than 40 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and co-founded SCOTUSblog, making this an unusually high-profile criminal matter involving a leading lawyer.
For legal professionals, the significance goes well beyond the headline.
The Supreme Court’s June 18 decision in Hunter v. United States is poised to reshape how courts, prosecutors, and defense counsel think about appeal waivers in criminal plea agreements. In a significant ruling, the Court held that such waivers are not categorically enforceable when enforcing them would result in a miscarriage of justice.
That holding marks an important shift in a plea-driven criminal system where appeal waivers have long been treated as a powerful tool for finality.
Thomas C. Goldstein, a nationally known Supreme Court advocate and co-founder of SCOTUSblog, has been sentenced in federal court to 72 months in prison for tax crimes and mortgage fraud. The court also revoked his bond and remanded him into custody at sentencing, an unusually sharp procedural turn that underscores how seriously the court viewed the conduct and the need for immediate detention.
The case stands out not only because of the sentence length, but because of the defendant’s stature in the legal profession.
The Supreme Court has handed down a major administrative-law ruling, siding with President Donald Trump in a dispute over the firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter and sharply expanding presidential removal authority over independent agencies. In doing so, the Court overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 1935 precedent that had long been understood to shield FTC commissioners from removal except for cause.
The case, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, et al., Petitioners v. Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, is likely to become a cornerstone decision in the Court’s modern separation-of-powers jurisprudence.
Bayer is making an aggressive new push to shrink one of the country’s most closely watched mass torts, asking the federal court overseeing Roundup litigation to dismantle nearly 4,000 pending cases after a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling it says undermines plaintiffs’ core warning-based claims.
The motion targets the federal multidistrict litigation before Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California, where Roundup plaintiffs have long alleged that Monsanto failed to adequately warn users that the herbicide could cause cancer.
In one of the most closely watched separation-of-powers developments of the Supreme Court’s recent term, the Court declined—for now—to let President Trump remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, signaling that the Federal Reserve may occupy a different constitutional space than other independent agencies. The move stands out all the more because the Court’s broader rulings this term generally expanded presidential authority to remove executive officials.
The litigation is unfolding through multiple levels of the federal courts, including Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, Applicant v. Lisa D. Cook, Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, et al. at the Supreme Court and Lisa Cook v. Donald Trump, et al in the D.C. Circuit.
The U.S. Supreme Court handed federal regulators two important victories, preserving enforcement tools that many companies had hoped the justices might narrow. In one decision, the Court ruled for the Federal Communications Commission in its dispute with ATT and Verizon over agency-imposed fines. In the other, the Court unanimously sided with the Securities and Exchange Commission, affirming the agency’s ability to seek broad disgorgement in enforcement actions involving investor fraud.
Taken together, the rulings stand out because they cut against the recent trend of heightened judicial skepticism toward administrative agencies.
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On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court denied the government’s application for a stay in Trump v. Cook, leaving in place a lower-court order that allows Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook to remain in office while her challenge to an attempted removal proceeds. The order is procedural, not a final ruling on the merits. But for lawyers watching the Court’s approach to presidential control over independent institutions, it is a meaningful development.
The dispute arises from the Trump administration’s attempt to remove Cook from the Federal Reserve Board.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 29, 2026 action in the Okello Chatrie geofence dispute is already being viewed as a major privacy ruling for the digital age. By holding that constitutional privacy protections extend to cellphone location data gathered through geofence-style investigative methods, the Court placed meaningful Fourth Amendment limits on one of law enforcement’s most controversial modern tools.
The case arises from a technique that allows investigators to seek location data for every device found within a defined geographic area during a set time window, often sweeping in information about many people not initially suspected of wrongdoing.
The Supreme Court denied certiorari in Petition DENIED Justice Thomas with whom, but the docket entry indicates the denial was accompanied by a statement or dissent from Justice Thomas joined by another Justice. While a cert denial does not decide the merits and creates no binding precedent, separate writings can still be important signals for litigants tracking where the Court may be headed next.
Because the Court declined review, the lower-court judgment remains in place.

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