The Supreme Court officially opened its 2026-27 term this week with four oral arguments across its first three sitting days, while denying review in hundreds of accumulated petitions. The new term’s opening docket reaches into climate-change liability, veterans’ benefits jurisdiction, retirement-fund fiduciary duties, and environmental review on Guam. At the same time, the justices’ emergency docket is already active: a dispute over broadcast advertising rates for political parties drew an administrative stay Thursday afternoon, and a challenge to the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ transgender healthcare policy remains pending.
Supreme Court opens 2026-27 term hearing four cases and denying hundreds
The term began Monday with two arguments. In Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, the justices considered whether a lawsuit filed in Colorado state court against energy companies for their alleged role in climate change can proceed, or whether federal law bars such claims. The argument produced mixed signals, with several justices probing whether state tort liability would impermissibly regulate interstate commerce and energy policy.
The moment captured the high stakes of statutory interpretation in the new term—where a single sentence, and a single pause, can shape a federal case for years.
Also on Monday, the Court heard Johnson v. United States Congress, which asks whether a federal district court may entertain a constitutional challenge to a law limiting disability benefits for certain incarcerated veterans. The debate centered on which court system has authority to review veterans’ benefits disputes when a constitutional question is at stake.
On Tuesday, in Anderson v. Intel Corporation Investment Policy Committee, the justices took up an Employee Retirement Income Security Act dispute over how courts should handle claims that retirement funds were invested imprudently. The discussion repeatedly returned to the need to compare a challenged investment with an appropriate alternative—one justice described the task as comparing apples to apples.
On Wednesday, the Court heard Department of the Air Force v. Prutehi Guåhan, a case arising from the Air Force’s application to renew a permit to dispose of munitions on a beach in northern Guam. The dispute turns on the interaction between two federal environmental laws and raises broader questions about how federal requirements apply to U.S. territories.
What the Court declined to hear in the first orders of the term
The justices also moved through a large number of petitions for review. In its first order list of the term, the Court denied review in hundreds of cases. The list included a dispute over whether schools may bar students from wearing sweatshirts bearing the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon,” a case concerning the Second Amendment rights of convicted felons, and two challenges to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
The Court also carried petitions forward for additional consideration. At a private conference on Friday, 13 petitions were relisted for a second look, and one summer holdover was scheduled for a fourth look. Orders from Friday’s conference are expected Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. EDT. The Supreme Court Building will be closed Monday for Columbus Day, so the justices will not return to the bench until Tuesday.
Emergency applications test the new term’s early weeks
The start of a term often brings urgent filings, and this year is no exception. The Court’s emergency docket now includes two high-profile disputes: one over the rates broadcasters charge for political advertising, and another over healthcare policy for transgender inmates in federal custody.
Political ad rates: an administrative stay preserves the status quo
The battle over favorable advertising rates returned to the Court on Thursday. At issue is a Federal Communications Commission “public notice” that extends the lowest-unit-rate guarantee for political advertising to political parties and joint fundraising committees. A lower-court ruling had effectively narrowed the preferred rate to candidates for federal office only, but the Supreme Court paused that ruling roughly a month ago.
On Thursday morning, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed a 15-page application asking the Court to block an order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that directed the FCC to act by noon on a challenge to the notice. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee filed their own application making the same request. Thursday afternoon, Chief Justice John Roberts granted an administrative stay, keeping the 4th Circuit’s order on hold while the Court considers the case. He directed challengers to respond by 5 p.m. EDT Saturday.
What is the political ad rate dispute before the Supreme Court?
At issue is whether the federal law’s lowest-unit-rate guarantee for “legally qualified candidates” also applies to political parties and joint fundraising committees. The FCC says it does; challengers say it does not. The Supreme Court’s administrative stay preserves the current status while the justices decide whether to intervene.
Transgender inmate healthcare: a status quo in the balance
Also on Thursday, lawyers for a group of transgender inmates urged the Supreme Court to deny the Trump administration’s request to block a federal judge’s order in Washington, D.C., barring the Bureau of Prisons from enforcing a new healthcare policy. The policy would prevent transgender inmates from obtaining gender-transition surgeries, hormone therapy, and what the inmates describe as “social accommodations.”
Attorney Li Nowlin-Sohl, representing the inmates, told the justices that the administration is asking the Court “to overturn a three decades-long status quo.” The emergency application in Trump v. Kingdom remains pending on the Court’s interim docket.
States and the NFL want the Court to decide who regulates prediction markets
Last month, New Jersey asked the Supreme Court to resolve whether states may regulate prediction markets like Kalshi or whether “the federal government should be in control.” This week, a bipartisan coalition of 39 states and the District of Columbia filed a brief supporting that request. The coalition, led by Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson, told the justices that “[f]ederal and state courts are hopelessly confused and divided over” the issue.
The NFL also filed a brief urging the Court to hear the case and to hold that states may regulate prediction markets. The league argued that federal regulators may not have “sufficient resources to ensure prediction markets ‘do not jeopardize game integrity.’” The case could define the boundary between state gambling law and federal commodities regulation for years to come.
Botched executions and fair-trial guarantees return to the foreground
Two separate developments in the past week have put capital punishment back in the news, and both touch on questions the Supreme Court has confronted before.
Tennessee’s attempted execution of Christa Pike
Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike on Sept. 30. After receiving two doses of lethal injection, she survived and is now conscious and speaking while continuing to recover. Her survival raises a constitutional question the Supreme Court last addressed in 1947: whether a second attempt to execute someone after a botched procedure would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
In that earlier case, the Court split 5-4 in the case of Willie Francis, a Black 17-year-old who survived an electrocution attempt. “Even the fact that petitioner has already been subjected to a current of electricity does not make his subsequent execution any more cruel in the constitutional sense than any other execution,” Justice Stanley Reed wrote. Louisiana later executed Francis.
Curtis Flowers, a landmark fair-trial decision, remembered
Curtis Flowers, whose death sentence and murder conviction were thrown out by the Supreme Court in 2019, died Wednesday at age 56. Flowers was 26 when he was arrested several months after the July 1996 shooting deaths of four people inside a Winona, Mississippi, furniture store. He was tried six times.
In Flowers v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court held that the prosecutor’s removal of Black prospective jurors had deprived Flowers of a fair trial. He remained in prison for six months after that ruling because he was still under indictment, and he was released in December 2019. Mississippi dropped all charges in September 2020. His legal team said his name is now “etched into U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence—about what it means to fight for a fair trial free from racial bias in the selection of jurors.”
Accountability and security: a mistaken raid and threats to the justices
The term’s opening week also brought news about legal accountability for government conduct and about the security environment around the Supreme Court itself.
Eleventh Circuit strips qualified immunity for FBI agent’s mistaken raid
In June 2025, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Martin v. United States revived a Georgia family’s lawsuit over an FBI raid conducted at the wrong address. On remand, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit on Wednesday reversed the qualified immunity previously granted to FBI Agent Lawrence Guerra, who led the raid.
The three-judge panel said Guerra’s conduct was “simply not consistent with a reasonable effort to ascertain and identify the place intended to be searched.” The panel also found that the United States is protected by sovereign immunity and that none of the 13 exceptions to the Federal Tort Claims Act applies in the case.
A sentence for threatening the justices
Panos Anastasiou, 78, was sentenced Wednesday to three years of supervised release for sending hundreds of threatening messages to the Supreme Court. Between 2023 and 2024, Anastasiou sent more than 500 messages through the Court’s public portal, including racist and homophobic rhetoric and calls for the assassination of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
He pleaded guilty earlier this year to making threats and to possessing a firearm as a felon. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors agreed not to seek prison time because of his advanced age and deteriorating health.
Deference to the Sentencing Commission’s commentary is next on the docket
The justices have not yet heard argument in Beaird v. United States, but the case is already shaping up as one of the term’s important criminal-law disputes. Federal judges must apply the sentencing guidelines before imposing a sentence, taking account of the recommended range and a host of other statutory factors.
The question in Beaird is how much deference courts owe to the commentary that the U.S. Sentencing Commission provides for interpreting and applying its guidelines. The answer could affect how sentences are calculated in federal courts nationwide and determine whether the Commission’s interpretations bind district judges or merely persuade them.
A Kagan-led term for criminal cases?
An analytic review of the 2025-26 term found that Justice Elena Kagan authored nearly one-third of the 16 “pure” criminal law decisions issued last term. That concentration stands out in a docket where criminal cases often produce shifting alignments.
Kagan’s output last term may signal a growing role for her in shaping the Court’s criminal procedure docket. With cases like Johnson and Beaird on the calendar, her influence could be just as visible in the new term.
Justice James Moore Wayne: the Georgian who stayed
One of the most consequential acts of Justice James Moore Wayne’s career was not an opinion, but a decision to remain on the Supreme Court after his home state seceded from the Union. Wayne served from 1835 until his death in 1867, and his story remains one of the most complicated on the Court’s antebellum history.
Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1790, Wayne was the son of a Revolutionary War veteran who owned plantations worked by nearly 100 enslaved people. Wayne was temporarily expelled from the College of New Jersey for joining a campus revolt but graduated in 1808. He read law in Savannah and New Haven, passed the bar in 1811, and served in a Georgia militia unit during the War of 1812—a war in which he saw no action.
After the war, Wayne won a state legislative seat, owing in part to his opposition to a law that froze debt collection. At only 27, he became mayor of Savannah. He later won election to Georgia’s Superior Court and then, in 1828, to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he supported President Andrew Jackson on nearly every major issue, including Cherokee removal and the fight over the national bank. Jackson nominated Wayne to the Supreme Court in January 1835, and the Senate confirmed him three days later. He was the first justice from Georgia.
Wayne’s “particular expertise” was admiralty law, but he also wrote important decisions outside that field. In Louisville Railroad Co. v. Letson, he held that a corporation can be considered a citizen of a state, reversing an older rule that had made it difficult for corporations to litigate in federal court on diversity grounds. One biographer called that opinion probably “Wayne’s greatest contribution to the jurisprudence of his day.” In Waring v. Clarke, he held that federal admiralty jurisdiction extended to any navigable water within the ebb and flow of the tide. In Cooley v. Board of Wardens, he dissented, arguing that states had no role in regulating interstate commerce.
Wayne’s record on slavery and race is far more difficult. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, he urged the Court not to avoid the question whether Congress could ban slavery in the territories. Legal historian Paul Finkelman has argued that Wayne, himself a slaveholder, wanted both that issue and the question of free Black citizenship resolved in favor of the South. Chief Justice Roger Taney ultimately wrote the infamous opinion holding that African Americans were not U.S. citizens and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
Yet in 1859, while riding circuit in Savannah, Wayne denounced the African slave trade as “inhuman” after a slave ship brought more than 400 Africans to Jekyll Island. The crewmen were acquitted anyway because of local sympathy for the defendants.
When Georgia seceded, Wayne’s son Henry left the U.S. Army to serve the Confederacy, and Wayne paid for his son’s journey south. But Wayne himself stayed on the Court, telling Henry that the South would still need a voice there. In 1862, a Confederate court declared Wayne an “Alien Enemy” and seized his property in Georgia. During the Civil War, Wayne pressed President Abraham Lincoln for lenient treatment of the South and refused to ride circuit in states occupied by the military. His vote was said to be decisive in Ex parte Garland, striking down a congressionally required loyalty oath that would have kept nearly every Southern lawyer from practicing before the Supreme Court.
Wayne died of typhoid fever in Washington in July 1867 at age 77. His death reduced the Court from nine to eight justices; legislation already in place would eventually shrink the Court to seven before the Judiciary Act of 1869 set the number permanently at nine. Chief Justice Salmon Chase remembered Wayne as “a most sincere and earnest patriot.”
At oral argument: “Be careful, counsel”
This week’s arguments also produced a memorable exchange in Johnson v. United States Congress. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pressed counsel on whether the context of the statute resolved its ambiguity, and Justice Elena Kagan offered her own reading of the law, asking whether it was “at least equally plausible.” As the lawyer began to answer, Justice Neil Gorsuch interjected: “Be careful, counsel.”
The moment captured the high stakes of statutory interpretation in the new term—where a single sentence, and a single pause, can shape a federal case for years.
With the first conference behind it and an emergency docket still churning, the 2026-27 term is already demonstrating how quickly the Court can shift between routine administration and constitutional drama. The orders expected Tuesday will show which cases the justices are willing to add to an already busy merits docket, and the arguments in the weeks ahead will test how far the Court intends to go in reshaping administrative law, criminal procedure, and the boundaries of state authority.
- Which four cases did the Supreme Court hear in the first week of the 2026-27 term?The Court heard Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, Johnson v. United States Congress, Anderson v. Intel Corporation Investment Policy Committee, and Department of the Air Force v. Prutehi Guåhan.
- What petitions did the Supreme Court decline to review in its first order list?The Court denied hundreds of petitions, including a dispute over 'Let's Go Brandon' sweatshirts, a Second Amendment case, and challenges to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
