The cascade of sweeping decisions was the culmination of a generational effort to transform the high bench with the appointment of reliably conservative justices.
Here’s a look at what the court accomplished this term and what its rulings mean for the future:
Red states — with the green light from the Supreme Court — moved quickly to enact abortion bans and extreme restrictions, and abortion rights advocates fought to slow the new bans.
The decision was a major victory not only for anti-abortion activists but for the conservative legal movement as a whole, which saw Roe v. Wade as a chief among several examples of the Supreme Court creating rights that lack express references in the text of the constitution.
In practical terms, Dobbs’ opinion means that state and federal lawmakers now have the ability to enact abortion restrictions up to and including outright bans, even though they already face legal challenges from abortion rights advocates who argue that some state constitutions protect the right to abortion.
That the court overturned 49 years of precedent — and one rooted in a deeply divisive issue affecting the most personal decision facing pregnant people and their families — was remarkable.
“Whatever the precise scope of the upcoming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: a curtailment of women’s rights and their status as free and equal citizens,” the liberal justices wrote jointly in their dissent.
Raising the legal bar for states and localities protecting gun safety laws
The conservative 6-3 majority made gun safety laws much more vulnerable to legal challenge in a case called the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, which affected New York’s restrictions on the public carrying of firearms.
The type of discretionary permit regime — where a gun owner must obtain special, discretionary approval to carry a firearm in public — that was overturned in the case has been adopted by only a few other states, even though those states contain some of the largest populations in the country.
The larger implication of the majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, is that lower courts are now being instructed to be more skeptical of gun restrictions. He wrote that the Constitution “presumptively” protects conduct covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment. It will be up to the government seeking to implement a new restriction to prove to the courts that “the regulation is consistent with this nation’s historic tradition of regulating firearms,” Thomas said.
Under the new Thomas test, courts must consider whether the regulation at issue has any historical parallel to the way firearms were approached at the time the constitution was drafted. Thomas emphasized that historical ideas about guns apply to modern firearms technology, but he still said the lack of a historical analogue for a regulation could make the regulation unconstitutional.
A Case for Climate Change That Weakens Executive Power
The Supreme Court dealt a major blow to both the Biden administration’s efforts to address climate change and the broader powers executive branch agencies have to regulate various policy areas.
The court did so Thursday in a case called West Virginia v. EPA, where the justices were reviewing a lower court ruling that said the Environmental Protection Agency, under a 1970 provision of the Clean Air Act, had broad powers to issue rules targeting carbon emissions in power plants. A 6-3 conservative majority overturned that decision, using a legal rationale that can now be used against numerous other types of regulations where government agencies are accused of overstepping their authority.
The judges in the EPA case developed a legal doctrine known as the Fundamental Issues Doctrine, which states that in order for an agency to issue a rule with significant economic or political impact, it must have received an express instruction from Congress to do so.
The court — revisiting a never-implemented Obama administration climate rule that the Biden administration has not tried to revive — said Congress did not give the EPA the authority to enforce the sweeping regulations the Obama EPA proposed. The decision is likely to intensify future challenges to the climate rule for power plants, which the Biden administration is working to implement. And it could provide fodder for lawsuits against other types of federal climate regulations, such as those targeting auto emissions or emissions from the oil and gas industry.
It also affects regulations coming from other agencies in the federal government, as decades of congressional gridlock have made executive agencies the primary source of policy.
Weakening of the walls between church and state
The conservative court changed the playing field around issues of religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
In one case, the 6-3 majority said Maine could not exclude religious education from a voucher program it offers to parents who live in rural areas without public schools. In another case, the court – again ruling on ideological grounds – sided with a public high school coach who suffered professional reprisals for praying on the field after football games.
Not every religious liberty case before the court was so divisive. An 8-1 court ruled that Texas must allow a death row inmate’s spiritual advisor to “lay hands” on him in prayer during his execution. And the court voted unanimously against Boston for refusing to fly a Christian flag atop a flagpole in front of City Hall as part of a program celebrating the greater Boston community.
According to Mark Rienzi — the president of the religious freedom advocacy group, the Becket Fund — the connection between the Boston flag case and the cases involving Maine’s voucher program and the high school football coach is the Supreme Court clarifying how governments should see establishment clause.
Rienzi said governments for decades at all levels have adopted an interpretation of the Establishment Clause that has led them to treat those who express religious expression worse than other types of actors.
Overall, the lesson for the court is, “Hey, governments, this is not the way you should be doing it,” Rienzi told CNN.
Making it harder to block immigration policies in court
Although immigrant rights advocates secured a short-term victory with a ruling that says the immigration law allows President Joe Biden to end controversial Trump-era immigration policies, that decision — and another from earlier in the term — is likely to prevented future legal efforts trying to stop the allegedly illegal immigration policies.
In both decisions, the Supreme Court limited the power of lower courts to block the implementation of certain immigration policies that were allegedly illegal. In the former case, Garland v. Gonzales, the conservative 6-3 majority said lower courts cannot offer class-wide relief in such cases — which concern policies related to the arrest, detention and removal of immigrants. That case was then cited in the court’s end-of-term ruling on the Trump administration’s so-called Remain in Mexico policy.
The holding suggests that henceforth, in cases involving these types of policies, lower courts may grant relief that affects individual claimants, but will not be permitted to issue orders that broadly prohibit immigration officials from engaging in certain practices .
This could have far-reaching implications for immigration policy. Over the past five years, numerous legal challenges to immigration policies have prevented these measures from being implemented.
Overall, it appears that the legal process to stop certain immigration policies in court will be much slower and more difficult for immigrant advocates. The time frame for these cases to reach the Supreme Court is already long, and the high court accepts only a limited number of cases each year.
Making it harder to hold government officials accountable for unconstitutional behavior
In two cases, the court limited the possibility of filing civil cases against individual civil servants who allegedly acted unconstitutionally in the performance of their official duties.
In a case called Egbert v. Boule, the court narrowed the precedent it established with the 1971 decision known as “Bivens,” which allowed an individual to sue a federal employee for damages if his fundamental rights were violated. In the Egbert case, the justices unanimously said that a federal border control agent could not be held individually civilly liable for alleged retaliation under the First Amendment.
In a part of the majority opinion that the three liberals disagreed with, Thomas also severely limited the circumstances in which an excessive force claim under the Fourth Amendment could be brought against a federal employee.
The decision had the effect of expanding the immunity protecting federal employees from private lawsuits, even if it did not completely overturn Bivens.
Later in the term, the court also undermined so-called Miranda rights protections—ie. the warning that suspects must receive from law enforcement that they have the right to remain silent and obtain a lawyer – in a case called Tekoh v. Vega. The court said that a law enforcement officer’s failure to provide a Miranda warning does not, by itself, make him vulnerable to a civil suit for a Fifth Amendment violation.
The decision did not eliminate the Miranda right, as evidence obtained when it was violated would still be excluded from trial. But critics of the ruling said that without the added legal risk of a potential civil suit, law enforcement officers would feel less incentive to comply with their Miranda obligations.
CNN’s Ella Nielsen and Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this…
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