Affirmative action, discrimination against LGBTQ people and election laws are some of the hot-button issues that the Supreme Court will tackle this fall.
The U.S. Supreme Court Building is shown in September 2022.
Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Major Supreme Court decisions and reversals last term are leaving some people, including this scholar on constitutional politics, wondering – what’s going on with the court?
Couy Griffin, a former county commissioner in Otero County, N.M., rides a horse in New York City in May 2020.
Gotham/Getty Images
Other countries disqualify political officials and prevent them from holding office more often than the US does. There are benefits and potential risks to using this kind of legal tactic.
Same-sex wedding cakes wound up at the Supreme Court – now, it’s wedding websites’ turn.
S_nke Bullerdiek/EyeEm via Getty Images
In 1972, justices handed down a decision that attacked discriminatory and capricious death sentences. But it left the door ajar for states to continue the practice.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife, conservative activist Virginia Thomas, in October 2021.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Lower federal court judges follow a formal code of ethics, but this does not apply to Supreme Court justices, leaving potential conflicts of interest unchecked.
All adult citizens who have not been convicted of a crime have the right to vote in federal and state elections.
Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
A doctrine embraced by some conservatives could be adopted by the US Supreme Court. And if the court does, Americans’ political power will be dramatically limited.
Marc Short, former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, testified in late July before a federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
Grand juries are meeting in Georgia and Washington, D.C., as part of investigations into attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. How do they work?
Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation Chuck Hoskin Jr. speaks in Tahlequah, Okla. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling is upending decades of law in support of tribes.
AP Photo/Michael Woods
For the past 50 years, the Supreme Court has issued rulings that narrow tribal rights while Congress has worked to expand them. A recent ruling struck yet another blow against Native sovereignty.
Is originalism now the dominant Supreme Court ideology?
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
The notwithstanding clause is both historically appropriate and democratically desirable. Excising it would make our Charter of Rights and Freedoms more American. Is that really where we want to go?
Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., left, and attorney Fred Gray, whom King called ‘the brilliant young Negro who later became the chief counsel for the protest movement,’ at a political rally in Tuskegee, Alabama, April 29, 1966.
AP Photo/Jack Thornell
When Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Fred Gray was her lawyer. Now he’s being honored for a lifetime of civil rights advocacy.
President Joe Biden meets the US Supreme Court’s chief justice John Roberts at the 1922 State of the Union address.
Mediapunchinc/Alamy
The justices who decided to overturn the abortion rights precedent of Roe v. Wade explained their reasoning, and signaled other precedents could be reversed as well.
Anti-abortion protestors celebrate the overturning of Roe v. Wade outside the US Supreme Court on June 24.
Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images
By a 6 to 3 majority, the Supreme Court decided to overrule the landmark Roe decision and end almost 50 years of access to abortion being a constitution right.
Supreme Court decides to upend 50 years of abortion rights.
Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
The Supreme Court on June 24, 2022, issued a ruling that overturned decades of constitutional abortion rights for women in the US. Scholars explain the significance of the decision.
Vice President Mike Pence returned to the House chamber to finish the process of counting the electoral votes in the early morning of Jan. 7, 2021.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The vice president has said he looks forward to meeting the framers of the Constitution in heaven. That is not the mindset of someone with short-term vision.
The current Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority.
Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Framers of the Constitution put in a clause giving lawmakers immunity from liability for any ‘speech or debate.’ Interpreting it may be key in the battle to get some Republicans to testify.