2025 SCOTUS Roundup

At the first Lawyers, Community, and Impact (LCI) event of the year, held on September 10 and moderated by Benjamin Liebman, vice dean for intellectual life and Robert L. Lieff Professor of Law, Columbia Law School faculty experts Gillian Metzger, Elora Mukherjee, Kate Redburn, and Thomas P. Schmidt unpacked important Supreme Court decisions with a focus on rulings on the emergency docket—commonly called the “shadow docket”—which are issued outside of formal opinions. 

Daniel Abebe, Dean and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law, introduced the event and said that the timing of the Supreme Court’s rulings has created a tradition of faculty members providing analysis at the LCI SCOTUS Roundup early in the fall semester. This offers an opportunity to “leverage the fantastic expertise of our wonderful faculty,” who regularly provide commentary in the media about the court’s rulings and “play a central role in shaping the national conversation,” he said.

Federal Agency Independence

Emergency orders granted by the Supreme Court that allowed the removal of members of independent government agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), are part of a decade-and-a-half-long trend of the Roberts court invalidating regulatory schemes and administrative structures, said Gillian Metzger, Harlan Fiske Stone Professor of Constitutional Law.

“The Supreme Court, in its recent decisions, kept saying that it’s not overturning Humphrey’s Executor,” the 1935 ruling that prevents presidents from removing independent agency members from their positions except for cause, Metzger said. But in the NLRB and MSPB cases, the court reiterated its position in previous cases that “the president can remove those who exercise executive power on their behalf, subject to narrow exceptions,” she said.

Allowing the president more power to remove independent agency leadership, as the court’s recent decisions do, “has been the trend of the court’s decisions,” Metzger said. “What is a little bit surprising is [that] they were doing this against the backdrop of a president who was exercising pretty aggressive executive power. And it didn’t seem to stop them one inch.”

Immigration

Elora Mukherjee, Jerome L. Greene Clinical Professor of Law, spoke about four emergency docket immigration decisions: two that permitted the end of Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua; one that allowed deportations to South Sudan; and Noem v. Perdomo, an emergency ruling in which the court allowed immigration enforcement stops in Los Angeles to continue based on race or ethnicity, command of English, location, and type of job. 

Mukherjee said that the rulings show that the Supreme Court is increasingly relying on the shadow docket “to issue hugely consequential immigration decisions without adequate reasoning—or any reasoning—and without letting lower court proceedings play out as they should.” Action by federal immigration authorities to detain and deport immigrants “is pushing the bounds of … executive authority well past the system of checks and balances that has been set up in our U.S. Constitution,” she said.

The Perdomo decision is “an invitation to law enforcement nationwide to engage in racial profiling,” Mukherjee said. “And through this one-paragraph decision on the shadow docket, the Supreme Court has turned America, our nation, into a show-me-your-papers nation where, depending on what you look like, you need to carry papers to prove that you belong in this country, and you should not be subject to summary deportation.” She added that the Supreme Court “has essentially become a rubber stamp for executive branch immigration policy, even policies that are clearly unconstitutional and illegal.” 

Medical Care and Gender

U.S. v. Skrmetti upheld a Tennessee state law restricting medical care for transgender minors. The court found that the law applied to individuals based on age and medical treatment rather than on sex, which would have required a higher standard of review, said Associate Professor of Law Kate Redburn. As a result, the ruling “leaves open a lot of questions for both the rights of transgender people under the 14th Amendment but also the status of sex-based equal protection law in general,” Redburn said. 

The scope of a “medical-context exception to sex classifications” is unclear, Redburn added, querying whether it could apply to “contraception or other kinds of sex-inflected medical regulation that’s not exclusive to trans people.”

Skrmetti did not cover what level of scrutiny would apply to a claim of transgender status discrimination, Redburn said. But, since the court has agreed to hear cases on the participation of transgender athletes on sports teams, “we'll probably have an answer to some of these open sex equality questions in the next year.”

Nationwide Injunctions

In Trump v. CASA Inc., the Supreme Court as a whole for the first time addressed the issue of universal injunctions in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump that sought to restrict birthright citizenship. The court ruled that lower courts could not issue universal injunctions that prohibit enforcement of executive actions beyond the plaintiffs before the court because that remedy was not available to the courts in the founding era. 

Like emergency rulings from the highest court, universal—or nationwide—injunctions from lower courts jumped in 2025, said Associate Professor of Law Thomas P. Schmidt, with about 25 issued so far this year compared with more than 100 in the nation’s history. “Presidents of both parties, when in power, have challenged their propriety in court,” he said. 

The birthright citizenship order had been blocked by lower courts, which issued universal injunctions against its implementation. In appealing to the Supreme Court, the administration did not argue that the executive order was lawful or defend it as consistent with the 14th Amendment, Schmidt said. “Instead, the only argument that the administration made to the Supreme Court was that the injunction granted by the courts below was too broad because it extended beyond the parties to the case.”  

About Lawyers, Community, and Impact: Launched in 2016, the series invites Columbia Law experts to talk about pressing current issues and brings deeper context and perspective to the work Columbia Law community members do both inside and outside the classroom.