We’re tracking the biggest cases the Supreme Court will hear in the 2023-2024 term

The Supreme Court announced on Wednesday that it will give a full hearing to a long-simmering dispute over whether far-right federal courts may ban the abortion drug mifepristone.

Mifepristone is part of a two-drug treatment that causes the uterus to expel pregnancy tissue. This two-drug regime, which may be taken up to the 70th day of a pregnancy, is often a safer alternative than surgical abortion — and it is also a less invasive procedure. More than half of all US abortions are medication abortions, which use mifepristone.

In an unexpected move, the Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will not hear a lawsuit challenging Washington state’s restrictions on an anti-LGBTQ practice known as “conversion therapy” — meaning that the restrictions will remain in place.

Conversion therapy is a discredited method of counseling that attempts to turn LGBTQ patients into cisgender heterosexuals — or, at least, to prevent them from expressing their actual sexual orientation or gender identity. As a federal appeals court that upheld the restrictions explained in its opinion, “every major medical, psychiatric, psychological, and professional mental health organization opposes the use of conversion therapy.”

The Supreme Court will soon hear a lawsuit that seeks to kill a leading proposal to reduce wealth inequality in the United States, even before that proposal becomes reality.

During her 2020 presidential campaign, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proposed a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans worth over $50 million. The idea was that, rather than merely taxing very wealthy people’s income and leaving their accumulated capital intact, the new tax would gradually chip away at massive fortunes and start to bring wealth inequality under control.

Last year, a federal appeals court dominated by Trump appointees and MAGA sympathizers ruled that the system the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uses to protect investors from fraud is unconstitutional — and that it is unconstitutional in three ways. This case, known as SEC v. Jarkesy, will be heard by the Supreme Court on November 29.

To be clear, we are talking about a federal agency that has existed since the Roosevelt administration, and whose governing statutes haven’t changed in any relevant way for more than a dozen years. Nevertheless, an especially right-wing panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit purported to find three entirely different constitutional flaws that somehow no one else has ever noticed before.

Every now and then, the Supreme Court takes up a case involving a public official who acted so foolishly — without any regard for the ordinary norms governing law enforcement, or without any insight into how their actions could undermine some of the government’s most important work — that you wish the justices could each take turns smacking them upside the head.

National Rifle Association v. Vullo, which the Court announced that it would hear last Friday, is such a case. It involves two unrelated actions which former New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) Superintendent Maria Vullo took against the NRA, one of which successfully shut down an NRA program that recklessly endangered countless New Yorkers’ lives — and one of which recklessly endangered Vullo’s effort to shut down this potentially deadly program.

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear Garland v. Cargill, a case that could legalize a device that allows an ordinary (and legal) semiautomatic firearm to mimic a fully automatic machine gun that can spew multiple bullets every second.

Cargill involves bump stocks, devices that use a gun’s recoil to repeatedly pull its trigger, allowing the gun to fire as many as 90 bullets in just 10 seconds. Bump stocks cause a gun’s trigger to buck against the shooter’s finger while the gun’s recoil makes it jerk back and forth, “bumping” the trigger and causing it to fire again and again.

The Twitter Wars have arrived at the Supreme Court.

On Halloween, the Supreme Court will hear the first two in a series of five cases the justices plan to decide in their current term that ask what the government’s relationship should be with social media outlets like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter (the social media app that Elon Musk insists on calling “X”).

The next gun rights case before the Supreme Court, United States v. Rahimi, involves an individual that no sensible society would allow to have a gun.

Three years ago, according to the Justice Department, Zackey Rahimi and his girlfriend had an argument in a parking lot where Rahimi threatened to take away their mutual child. He then allegedly grabbed her wrist, knocked her to the ground, dragged her to the car, and hit her head on the dashboard. After he realized that a witness had seen this fight, Rahimi allegedly pulled a gun and fired at this bystander.

Editor’s note, October 20, 3:40 pm ET: The Supreme Court denied Missouri’s request to reinstate its gun law. Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

Missouri’s Second Amendment Preservation Act (SAPA) is one of the most incompetently drafted statutes to reach the Supreme Court in a long time. It is written as though the state legislature were trying to goad federal courts into striking it down — something such a court did, in fact, do last March.

Late Monday afternoon, the Supreme Court handed down a very brief order establishing that sellers of “ghost guns,” weapons that are sold dismantled in ready-to-assemble kits, must comply with the same gun safety laws and anti-crime laws as any other gun seller.

At this point you may be experiencing déjà vu, because in August the Supreme Court also handed down a brief order establishing ghost gun sellers must comply with these laws. The more recent case, known as Garland v. Blackhawk Manufacturing Group, arrived on the Court’s docket after federal district court Judge Reed O’Connor, a former Republican Capitol Hill staffer known for handing down dubiously reasoned opinions that benefit Republican causes, effectively tried to neutralize the Supreme Court’s August 2023 decision.

The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority spent Wednesday morning seemingly hunting for a reason to uphold a South Carolina congressional map that everyone agrees was gerrymandered to benefit the Republican Party.

The case is Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.

On October 11, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to racially gerrymandered congressional maps in South Carolina that could tell us a lot about where the Court stands on voting rights.

The lower court in this case, known as Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, determined that the state’s Republican legislature excluded Black voters from the state’s First Congressional District in order to shore up Republican control of that district.

Imagine that the Supreme Court of the United States spent an entire morning debating whether penguins are the primary cause of colon cancer or whether John F. Kennedy was assassinated by aliens from the planet Venus.

That’s more or less the quality of arguments that former Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco presented to the Court on Tuesday, as part of a quizzical effort to convince the justices to declare an entire federal agency unconstitutional.

Editor’s note, October 20, 5 pm ET: The Supreme Court temporarily placed the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Murthy on hold while it takes more time to fully consider the case. The Court will hear oral arguments in this case, most likely in the winter, and is expected to release an opinion by the end of June.

About a year ago, an especially right-wing panel of the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that Texas’s state government may effectively seize control of content moderation on social media websites such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

The Supreme Court handed down two very brief orders on Tuesday, informing the state of Alabama that no, it is not allowed to defy one of the Court’s decisions on gerrymandering.

In June, in one of the most surprising decisions the Court has handed down in years, the justices voted 5-4 to affirm a lower court decision striking down Alabama’s congressional maps. The courts ordered the state to draw new maps that include at least two districts where Black voters can elect their candidates of choice.

Deborah Laufer has filed more than 600 different lawsuits — many of which, according to a federal court in Maryland, appear to follow the same pattern. The defendants are typically small hotels, and Laufer accuses them of failing to comply with a federal regulation requiring that they disclose on their websites whether their rooms are accessible to people with disabilities.

She also has a remarkable penchant for hiring ethically challenged lawyers. One, Tristan Gillespie, was suspended from the bar of that same Maryland court, in large part because of a scheme where he would use Laufer’s cases to squeeze money out of these hotels for work that he never did. Another, Thomas Bacon, was, according to the court, Gillespie’s “boss” and the mastermind of a “scheme that raises serious ethical concerns.” Another former lawyer, Daniel Ruggiero, was recently forbidden from practicing law for a year due to an unrelated scheme targeting homeowners with unpaid mortgage bills.

The plaintiffs’ arguments in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association, which the justices will hear on October 3, are simultaneously some of the silliest and some of the most dangerous ideas ever presented to the Supreme Court of the United States.

They claim that an entire federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), is unconstitutional. And they do so based on an interpretation of the Constitution that would invalidate Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and countless other federal programs. As the Justice Department notes in one of its briefs, the 2022 legislation funding the federal government contains more than 400 provisions that are invalid under these plaintiffs’ reading of the Constitution.

Alabama is back in the Supreme Court — to seek the justices’ permission to openly defy one of the Court’s recent orders.

In June, the Supreme Court ordered Alabama to redraw its racially gerrymandered congressional map to include a second district where Black voters could elect their representative of choice. This case is known as Allen v. Milligan.