As we draw closer to the “long conference” on Sept. 28, our petitions page is filling up with notable petitions for review that are scheduled to be discussed. As Amy reported last year, over the past decade, the justices have granted between five and 15 petitions from this conference.
At the Court
On Friday, the Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to pause a lower-court ruling that would halt construction of a new White House ballroom. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the private nonprofit challenging the construction project, responded to this request on Tuesday, asking the court to leave the ruling in place. The matter is now fully briefed, so the court’s response could come at any time.
On July 27, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on its emergency docket to clear the way for the implementation of President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting. Twelve states later echoed this request in their own application. One week later, the group of 23 states and the District of Columbia challenging the order asked the court to deny these requests. Last week, the Trump administration urged the court to “promptly” issue its decision.
Morning Reads
Trump tells Supreme Court 'unprecedented' threats make ballroom vital
Maureen Groppe, USA Today
In its final expected brief at this stage of the White House ballroom dispute, the Trump administration asserted that “[f]inishing the president’s $400 million ballroom is a national security ‘imperative,’” and that “any delay in the project ‘presents unacceptable risk,’” according to USA Today. “When the President, his staff, his family, and the White House complex are not fully secure, time is of the essence,” wrote U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer. As USA Today noted, “[u]nless the Supreme Court intervenes, a judge’s order halting the above-ground portion of the project while the legal fight continues will go into effect on Aug. 21.”
Border Agents Searched His Phone 5 Times Without a Warrant. He's Asking the Supreme Court To Put a Stop to It.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason
In her newsletter for Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown highlighted a recently filed petition for review asking the Supreme Court to consider immigration agents’ practice of “seiz[ing] and search[ing] your stuff—including your cellphone, your laptop, or any other electronic device—without a warrant and without suspicion if you’re around the border or flying into or out of the country.” Are such searches constitutional? “Federal courts have disagreed,” according to the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the petitioner, George Anibowei, “an immigration lawyer and a naturalized U.S. citizen” who “frequently travels internationally” and has had his phone searched by immigration authorities five times over the past decade. “Two federal circuits hold that a warrant is generally required at the border, while six … hold that a warrant is never required.”
Fourth Circuit upholds injunction barring immigration arrests at some houses of worship
Joe Dodson, Courthouse News Service
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld an injunction preventing immigration officials from more freely conducting “enforcement actions in places of worship,” according to Courthouse News Service. “The injunction, sought by groups of Quakers, Sikhs and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, came after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security rescinded a longstanding policy of limiting immigration enforcement actions at or near houses of worship in January 2025.” In the Tuesday opinion, “Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Barbara Keenan agreed with the lower court that the new policy likely violates the plaintiffs’ rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and their First Amendment right to expressive association,” by, among other things, discouraging immigrants from attending worship. She rejected the government’s claim that faith groups needed to prove that the policy change caused an attendance decline, citing “the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling in Department of Commerce v. New York,” on the first Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the census, to explain her conclusion. In that case, Keenan wrote, the majority held that the states, counties and cities challenging the question needed only to show that it was likely to “reduce participation and lead to an inaccurate population count” to have standing to bring their lawsuit.
Close Calls
David Cole, The New York Review (paywalled)
In a column for The New York Review, David Cole reflected on what we learned about the Supreme Court during the 2025-26 term, highlighting a gap he sees between conservative justices’ willingness to constrain the president’s power and the same justices’ willingness to constrain their own. “[W]hile the conservatives may not be doing Trump’s bidding, they are pursuing their own ideological aims, often heedless of precedent,” Cole wrote. In his view, such an approach to the law harms the country. “Limits on presidential power are essential to a constitutional democracy, but so, too, are limits on the Court’s power.”
On Site
Court News
Florida Republicans bring Census Bureau challenge to the Supreme Court
A group of Florida Republicans has appealed a ruling by a federal court in that state throwing out a lawsuit seeking to require the U.S. Census Bureau to revise its data for the 2020 census. Arguing that the statistical methods the Census Bureau used in the 2020 census led to inaccurate results, the challengers told the justices that, “[w]ith each decade the census strays further from” what is required by the U.S. Constitution.
From the SCOTUSblog Team
The scope of the Supreme Court’s emergency docket
On Aug. 12, an unusual emergency docket application captured court watchers’ attention. It centered on a dog named Bruce who was scheduled to die. The case served as a reminder that the emergency docket consists of a wide – and likely growing – range of matters, not just the applications in capital cases and disputes over federal and state policies that most people think of when they consider this area of the court’s work.
Contributor Corner
Trump detention policy nears SCOTUS
For his Immigration Matters column, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández explored the growing legal battle over “whether ICE can detain migrants who have been living in the United States without the government’s permission for many years and refuse to let them ask an immigration judge for release.” As he noted, the Supreme Court is likely to agree soon to weigh in on the issue.
Podcasts
Divided Argument
A Thriving Atrocities Practice
Dan Epps and Will Baude discuss Justice Samuel Alito’s summer interview, the new birthright-citizenship executive orders, and the Supreme Court’s record-low approval numbers. Then, they dive deep on Cisco Systems v. Doe, the Falun Gong surveillance case that closed the door Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain left open for new Alien Tort Statute claims.
Amarica's Constitution
Preclearing the President
What happens when the president loses in court, even at the Supreme Court, but repeatedly attempts to fight the battle again? Akhil Amar and Andy Lipka reflect on this question as they wrap up their Roberts court constitutional survey.
A Closer Look
Thompson v. Wilson
During the 2025-26 term, the Supreme Court handed down a significant ruling on personal location information and privacy, holding in Chatrie v. United States that law enforcement’s use of cellphone location data from Google constituted a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. Now, the justices have another opportunity to weigh in on government use of modern tracking tools, though not in the context of criminal investigations. The pending petition for review instead centers on the lobstering industry in Maine.
The dispute addressed in the petition dates back to 2022, when the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which creates fishery management plans for 15 states and the District of Columbia, updated its guidance on fishing for lobsters and Jonah crabs to include boat-tracking. In response, the Maine Department of Marine Resources imposed a rule requiring federally permitted lobstermen (apparently a gender neutral term) to carry a tracking device on their vessels that collects location data once per minute anytime the vessels are in use.
After Maine’s rule took effect, a group of lobstermen challenged it in federal district court, asserting that the rule violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures.” They contended that Maine could accomplish its goal of tracking lobster fishing activity with more tailored surveillance, emphasizing that the devices required by the rule would monitor even personal boat trips unrelated to the lobster business.
Maine moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the rule satisfies a recognized exception to the Fourth Amendment for certain administrative searches – that is, inspections by government agencies – within closely regulated industries. U.S. District Judge John A. Woodcock, Jr. agreed that it served a “substantial government interest,” including the requirement to keep trackers on during personal trips. “[B]ecause it is essential that the data be accurate, the fact that lobstermen could forget to turn on the device would skew the results,” he wrote. Woodcock granted Maine’s motion to dismiss, but he “encourage[d] the lobstermen to appeal” to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit for “an authoritative ruling” on the Fourth Amendment issues involved.
One of the lobstermen, Frank Thompson, did just that, asking the 1st Circuit to review his Fourth Amendment claim. But in November, the appeals court affirmed Woodcock’s decision, holding that Maine’s tracking of lobster boats satisfies the three prongs of the Burger test, which the Supreme Court established in 1987’s New York v. Burger for assessing whether an administrative search can take place without a warrant. To pass, the challenged inspections must: 1) stem from a regulatory scheme that serves a substantial government interest; 2) be necessary to further that scheme; and 3) “give notice to those being regulated” and be limited “in terms of time, place, and scope.” The 1st Circuit acknowledged that Maine’s tracking scheme involves the near-constant collection of data when a boat is in motion – and thus does not appear, at first, to be limited – but concluded that it still passes the third prong because imposing a time limit “would frustrate the regime’s design” by enabling some boat trips to go untracked.
In March, Thompson appealed to the Supreme Court, urging it to revisit its Fourth Amendment doctrine and clarify how to assess government inspections that impact not just business operations, but also noncommercial activity. “The First Circuit’s decision to judge the reasonableness of 24/7 government searches of private property based on business owners’ reasonable expectations of privacy—not on their core Fourth Amendment freedoms from trespass to property—is precisely the kind of jurisprudential ‘miasma’ that this Court should clear up,” Thompson asserts in his petition for review.
Initially, Maine waived its right to respond to the petition, but, in early June, the court called for a response. In that brief, filed last month, the state contends that Thompson’s petition “focuses on an argument he never raised to the First Circuit:” that courts must go beyond the Burger test when assessing a challenged government inspection. “In sum,” the state writes, “the Petition presents a variety of reasons that weigh against granting it: unpreserved issues not addressed below; hypothetical questions that would not affect the case at hand; and arguments grounded in fundamental misconceptions of applicable precedent.”
Thompson v. Wilson is scheduled to be considered by the justices for the first time at their “long conference” on Sept. 28.
SCOTUS Quote
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: “Are you sure you want what you're asking for? What if we go ahead and decide this case and rule against you?”
MR. BISHOP: Well, we are – we are hoping that you rule – you'll rule with us. And certainly, on the basis of this rule –”
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE SCALIA: “That's usually the objective.”
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