‘A Duck or a Rabbit’: 2026 SCOTUS Roundup

At the first Lawyers, Community, and Impact (LCI) event of the academic year, held on September 13, Columbia Law School faculty experts Suzanne B. Goldberg, Gillian Metzger ’96, Elora Mukherjee, and Thomas P. Schmidt unpacked important U.S. Supreme Court decisions from the 2025–2026 term, including rulings on presidential power, transgender athletes, immigration, and redistricting. 

“Maybe even more than most years, we have an absolutely enormous amount to cover,” said Benjamin L. Liebman, vice dean for intellectual life and Robert L. Lieff Professor of Law, who moderated the annual discussion that looks back each fall at the previous term’s SCOTUS rulings.

Associate Professor of Law Thomas P. Schmidt kicked off the conversation with an overview of the term and compared the court to a 19th-century optical illusion of a drawing that can look either like a duck or a rabbit, depending on the viewer’s perspective.

“You can look to the past term and see the Supreme Court as an independent branch of government that has bravely resisted the current administration on some of its most important initiatives: tariffs, the deployment of the National Guard in American cities, the birthright citizenship case,” he said. But another, more critical perspective would see a court that “has been captured by a conservative supermajority,” that “is recklessly overturning precedent year after year, claiming fealty to originalism while applying it in a highly selective way,” and that “has embraced a very muscular view of executive power at the very moment our institutions are on the brink of authoritarian collapse.”

Given those two starkly different narratives, he said, “One of the questions that we’re going to be asking today is, which of these stories is correct? Is the court a duck, or is the court a rabbit?”

Firing at Will

In June, the Supreme Court denied the president’s ability to fire a governor of the Federal Reserve in Trump v. Cook but allowed the Trump administration to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission in Trump v. Slaughter. The Slaughter case “is the big doozy on executive power that we have all been expecting,” said Gillian Metzger, Harlan Fiske Stone Professor of Constitutional Law. The decision, which Metzger said had been previewed in a 2020 case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, overturns Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 ruling that prevented presidents from removing independent agency members from their positions except for cause. 

Metzger noted that the Slaughter opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, does not limit itself to removing principal agency officers and instead speaks of power to remove subordinates, a term that could include civil servants. “The potential breadth there is really quite striking. … If this rule extends to the civil service, that’s a huge deal and goes beyond what one might expect,” she said.

The Slaughter decision curtails Congress’ power to impose conditions on removal of agency officials, she added. “The loser here is Congress. The president gains power; the court gains some power. Congress loses the ability to impose for-cause limits,” she said. This was “a consistent theme of this term,” Metzger said, with rulings on the Voting Rights Act and federal grant spending also weakening congressional power. “Congress lost in a number of cases,” she said.

In preventing the firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook by making a “carve-out” for the Federal Reserve, Metzger noted that the court’s majority opinion said that the Fed is different from other government entities, but it “never really grapples with … what the implications should be.” The “best explanation of why the Fed was pulled out,” she added, is found in a concurring opinion from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote that despite the Slaughter ruling, the question of Fed independence should not be reopened because it would cause international economic turmoil.

Banning Transgender Athletes 

In cases challenging state laws that bar transgender women and girls from playing on women’s and girls’ public school sports teams, the court upheld the state bans. Cases involving transgender people have been “one of the most significant areas in which the court has been developing its equal protection doctrine,” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law. “In other words,” she added, these are important cases in which the court is asking, “What justifications are necessary for the government to draw lines” between groups of people?

Twenty-seven states currently restrict transgender athletes’ participation in school sports. “One of the interesting questions in the case is, when there’s a majority of states that have these laws, does that mean that they’re OK?” Goldberg said. “Is that enough to say that, therefore, they’re justified? The court seems to think this is an important fact in the law’s favor.”

In the case of West Virginia v. B.P.J., Goldberg said, the ban’s justification is “fairness in competition and prevention of sports-related injuries” for athletes playing women’s sports after going through male puberty. B.P.J., who has publicly identified as female since the third grade and takes medication to prevent the onset of male puberty while also receiving estrogen therapy, lost a sex discrimination claim, Goldberg said, because the court held that “the states don’t have to worry about a small subclass of people like B.P.J. who haven’t gone through male puberty. They don’t have to think about this subgroup to whom the state’s justifications don’t apply.” Goldberg then noted the dissenters’ point that all persons are entitled to equal protection of the laws, including a member of a small subgroup of a larger class like B.P.J.

Ending an Immigration “Success Story”

In Mullin v. Doe, the court allowed the Trump administration to remove Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from Haitian and Syrian immigrants living in the United States. The decision overturned policies that dated back to 2010, when Haiti suffered a major earthquake, and 2012, when Syria was in political upheaval. The case has the potential to devastate the lives of 1.3 million TPS holders in the United States. 

“In a country where we regularly lament a broken immigration system, TPS was a rare, long-standing success story,” said Elora Mukherjee, Jerome L. Greene Clinical Professor of Law. “Those with TPS were subjected to continuous and rigorous vetting. They contributed to the United States as medical professionals, reporters, business owners, caretakers, construction workers. We’ve had TPS holders right here on our campus, both as students and as employees.” The Mullin decision, she added, is “part of what’s being called ‘the Great Delegalization’: efforts by the Trump administration to take people who had lawful status as of January 2025 and make them undocumented and subject to deportation.”

In Trump v. Barbara, the court struck down on constitutional grounds an executive order that declared that individuals born in the United States are not U.S. citizens at birth if their parents are here with temporary visas or are undocumented. Pointing to the court’s 5-4 split, Mukherjee said, “What is shocking in the Barbara case is that only five justices affirm the bedrock principle that birthright citizenship is embedded in the Constitution.” The citizenship affirmation, she added, is “the only solace that immigrant families had in a Supreme Court term that was otherwise a rubber stamp for the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.” 

Redistricting and Race  

Schmidt offered commentary on a congressional redistricting case, Louisiana v. Callais, in which the Supreme Court determined that Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map that created a second majority-Black district in its effort to remedy racial vote dilution was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. He warned the decision may be “the death knell of racial vote dilution claims” under the Voting Rights Act. 

The Callais decision replaces a “results” test with what amounts in practice to an “intent” test for Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Schmidt said. Further, he added, the decision “essentially says that partisan gerrymandering, the desire for partisan advantage, is a legitimate, race-neutral reason to be drawing a map.”

Schmidt pointed to the 2019 Rucho decision, which held that partisan gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable in federal court because, as he paraphrased the opinion, there was no “judicially manageable standard to figure out when too much partisan gerrymandering has happened.” Though the court pointedly refused to condone partisan gerrymandering in Rucho, Schmidt said, in Callais, the court “seems to be embracing that … [partisan gerrymandering] is a perfectly legitimate basis to redraw maps.” The result, he said, has been and will be to unleash further partisan-driven redistricting.  

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.