Most Impactful SCOTUS Decisions You Missed
The Supreme Court issues yet another slate of historic decisions over the summer. (Photo via Reuters)
MICHAEL SHTROM: No summer at the Supreme Court is ever uneventful, but the Supreme Court’s summer 2025 term appears to be one of the busiest and most significant in recent history. Handing down precedent-setting decisions about presidential powers, religious freedom, and ICE activities, the Supreme Court’s rulings this summer are sure to change the political landscape for decades to come. In case you missed them, here are four of the Court’s most important cases over the summer:
Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond
This case revolves around the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, an online religious charter school hoping to gain public funding from the State of Oklahoma. In contention was the question of whether religious charter schools receiving public funding constitutes a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from supporting any particular religion. The Oklahoma Supreme Court initially found the funds to be unconstitutional, but St. Isidore appealed the decision, resulting in the Supreme Court taking on the case in June. The court was split 4-4 on the decision, with justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself from the case. As such, the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s ruling was upheld, and at least for now, religious charter schools cannot receive public funds, due to the government’s obligation to separate church and state.
In March of 2025, President Donald Trump attempted to fire two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission for seemingly political reasons, the first political firings of FTC commissioners since FDR did so in 1933. When one of the commissioners, Rebecca Slaughter, sued the president, Trump appealed the case to the Supreme Court through the emergency docket. The emergency docket, often referred to as the shadow docket due to the Court’s lack of written explanations in decisions of that docket, is a way for a case to bypass the typical appeals process and be decided by the Supreme Court in a speedier and less transparent manner. In addition to being significant as an example of the Trump administration’s eagerness to use the shadow docket to advance its goals, the case raises major questions about the president’s ability to fire leaders of independent agencies. The case remains in progress, but the Supreme Court has stayed a lower court order requiring Trump to keep the commissioners in place until the case is resolved.
In light of recent increase in ICE raids and enforcement operations, questions have arisen about how ICE agents choose who to stop, search, and question. According to the United States District Court for the Central District of California, ICE agents in Los Angeles had been using factors such as a person’s physical location, job, English language proficiency, and “apparent race or ethnicity.” On this basis, the District Court issued an injunction that prevented agents from stopping people suspected of being in the United States illegally due to those factors. The Supreme Court stayed the District Court’s injunction, meaning the injunction is removed and operations can temporarily continue as normal. This signaled the Court’s potential support of using such factors in establishing reasonable suspicion, the legal bar that law enforcement agents must clear to stop and search people under the Fourth Amendment. Opponents of the Supreme Court’s decision to stay the injunction worry it could lead to racial profiling by ICE on account of perceived Latino heritage. Another instance of the Trump administration’s use of the shadow docket, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo promises to intensify ICE’s targeting of Latino populations in Los Angeles and the United States.
On the first day of President Trump’s second term, he issued an executive order which effectively abolished birthright citizenship. By redefining what it meant to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, the order declared that only those born on American soil to at least one American citizen parent will be considered a citizen at birth. Citing the order’s conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment, which explicitly guarantees birthright citizenship, federal district judges in Washington, New Jersey, and other states issued universal injunctions on the order, meaning it could not be enforced anywhere in the nation. In its ruling, the Supreme Court ruled such universal injunctions unconstitutional, although the justices avoided directly ruling on the issue of birthright citizenship. As such, the case effectively upholds Trump’s order until further legal action challenges it on another basis.
Michael Shtrom is a freshman from Los Altos, CA studying Public Policy. Outside of On the Record, he writes for The Hoya and is involved with GU Politics.