President Donald Trump has returned to the Supreme Court to challenge a second jury award to E. Jean Carroll. Look to the Morning Reads section for more on the new petition for review.
At the Court
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied requests for a stay of execution from James Aren Duckett, who was sentenced to death for the murder of 11-year-old Teresa McAbee, and Dominick Occhicone, who was convicted of killing Martha and Raymond Artzner. Both men were executed on Tuesday in Florida.
The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court on its emergency docket to clear the way for full implementation of President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting. A response to this request from those states challenging the order is due on Monday by 4 p.m. EDT.
Morning Reads
Trump Asks Supreme Court to Overturn $83.3 Million Award in Carroll Defamation Case
Abbie VanSickle, The New York Times (paywalled)
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump filed a petition for review with the Supreme Court, asking the justices “to step in and overturn an $83.3 million jury award against him for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of a decades-old sexual assault in a Manhattan department store,” according to The New York Times. “The president urged the justices to reject the jury’s award, asserting that the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision granting presidents sweeping immunity for actions they take in office shielded him from liability in the case.” “Lawyers for the Justice Department separately also asked the justices to take up the case, according to a filing to the court reviewed by The Times.” Trump’s new petition, which has not yet been publicly docketed by the Supreme Court, is separate from his earlier appeal of a $5 million judgment against him in a sexual abuse and defamation case brought by Carroll. The justices denied that earlier petition for review on June 29, but Trump has since filed a petition for rehearing.
Supreme Court Job Approval Slumps to Record Low
Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup
A new Gallup survey shows that “Americans’ approval of the job the U.S. Supreme Court is doing has fallen to a record low of 33%, driven by a steep drop in Republicans’ backing of the court since last year. The prior low approval rating was 39% measured a year ago.” As Gallup noted, support for the court among Republicans has fallen significantly in recent months, from 79% in September 2025 to 58% this month. “This decline may indicate that rulings unfavorable to the Trump administration this term, such as those on tariffs and birthright citizenship, weigh more heavily in Republicans’ evaluations of the court than the rulings that favored Trump and the GOP.”
Court panel declines to block Trump’s mail ballot order, but its status for midterms remains unclear
Nicholas Riccardi, Associated Press
One day after the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to pause a lower-court decision limiting implementation of President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting, a federal appellate panel on Tuesday declined to block the order in a separate but related case. “The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a May ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Carl J. Nichols that said an injunction against the order was premature. Nichols ruled that the Democrats and voting rights groups who challenged the order couldn’t seek the injunction until the Trump administration issued formal regulations governing it.” However, Tuesday’s decision from the D.C. Circuit panel “noted that if the administration truly tried to force such changes in the few months remaining before November’s midterm election, it may well get halted by courts.”
Trump: New tariffs ‘doing the same thing’ as the ones struck down by Supreme Court
Kevin Breuninger, CNBC
During an interview on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said new tariffs imposed by his administration, including the 10% to 12.5% tariffs imposed last week “on goods from more than 80 countries, on the grounds that those trade partners failed to effectively prohibit the use of forced labor,” “are functionally the same as the ones the Supreme Court struck down as illegal earlier this year,” according to CNBC. “It’s a shame that I have to go a harder way for the tariffs because the Supreme Court, in a very close decision, you know, ruled against me,” the president said. CNBC noted that “Trump’s comments on tariffs came four days after a federal lawsuit accused his administration of using different statutes as a pretext to resurrect the global tariff regime that failed in the courts.”
Florida carries out first double execution in 60 years
Katie Mettler, The Washington Post (paywalled)
The executions in Florida on Tuesday of James Aren Duckett and Dominick Occhicone “further cement[ed] Florida as the most active death penalty state in the nation,” according to The Washington Post. Since Gov. Ron DeSantis “took office in 2019, the Florida Department of Corrections has executed 38 people, a rate that exceeds any other state’s by a wide margin.” Florida’s embrace of the death penalty comes as Americans’ approval of capital punishment is on the decline. “A 2025 Gallup poll found that 52 percent of respondents were in favor of executing those convicted of murder and 44 percent were opposed – the lowest favorability numbers since 1972, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case that many state death penalty statutes were ‘cruel and unusual.’”
Most Americans favor big changes to the political system that likely would require amending the Constitution
Drew DeSilver and John Gramlich, Pew Research Center
In a new analysis on recent public opinion polls, Pew Research Center highlighted broad support for a variety of “major changes to the nation’s political system,” including age limits for Supreme Court justices. Overall, 74% of U.S. adults, including 82% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans, favor putting a maximum age limit in place for justices. Pew noted that a similar share of Americans (79%) favor “putting a maximum age limit in place for federal elected officials.” Age limits likely couldn’t be imposed in either context without a constitutional amendment, according to Pew.
On Site
Court News
Trump administration appears not to have asked Supreme Court to rehear birthright citizenship case
The Trump administration will apparently not ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its June 30 ruling that struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship. Although Trump had indicated earlier this month that he intended to file a petition for rehearing in the case, the deadline for doing so – July 27 – has now passed, and no such brief appears on the court’s electronic docket for the case.
Contributor Corner
Notable concurring opinions from this term
In his Courtly Observations column, Erwin Chemerinsky highlighted four particularly notable concurring opinions from the 2025-26 term.
SCOTUS Outside Opinions
Eliminate the summer recess
In a column for SCOTUSblog, Josh Blackman explained why he believes the Supreme Court should do away with its summer recess as well as its traditional July 4 deadline for releasing opinions in argued cases. “The Supreme Court, like nearly everyone else in America, should work year-round to get the job done,” Blackman wrote.
Podcasts
Advisory Opinions
Reviewing the Court’s Criminal Law | Interview: Rory Little and Orin Kerr
Sarah Isgur and David French discuss new data on questions that the Supreme Court justices are asking, dive into the definition of stipulation, and run through a few questionable subpoenas of reporters. Then, they conduct a crime-apalooza interview with University of California law professor Rory Little and Stanford law professor Orin Kerr.
Ask Amy
Q: How common are oral dissents? Are some justices more likely than others to dissent from the bench?
A: Oral dissents – that is, when a justice reads a summary of his or her dissent from the bench when an opinion is handed down – are fairly rare. They are a signal of how strongly the dissenting justice feels about his or her disagreement with the majority. The court’s Democratic appointees – and in particular Justice Sonia Sotomayor – are most likely to dissent from the bench (probably because they are most likely to be on the losing side in the most ideologically divided cases). Indeed, during the 2025-26 term, Sotomayor delivered multiple oral dissents, including when the court sided against asylum seekers in a border dispute, cleared the way for the president to remove the heads of certain federal agencies, and upheld laws barring transgender females from competing on women’s and girls’ sports teams.
During the 2024-25 term, there were (as reflected in the opinion announcement audio clips available at Oyez) only three dissents from the bench, all from Sotomayor. They came in three of the biggest cases of the term: Mahmoud v. Taylor, Trump v. CASA, and United States v. Skrmetti.
There were six dissents from the bench during the 2023-24 term. Four came from Sotomayor, in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, Garland v. Cargill, SEC v. Jarkesy, and Trump v. United States. Justices Elena Kagan (Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo) and Ketanji Brown Jackson (Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System) had one each. Jackson also had an unusual oral concurring opinion, in Moyle v. United States.
SCOTUS Quote
JUSTICE SCALIA: “So you want us to eat those words, they were wrong, or – or somehow you don't come within them?”
MR. BOUFFARD: “Respectfully, Justice Scalia, I think those words came from your dissent in that case.”
JUSTICE SCALIA: “Ah.”
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE SCALIA: “I forgot that.”
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE SCALIA: “So you say they were wrong, you say?”
(Laughter.)
— Dan's City Used Cars, Inc. v. Pelkey (2013)
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