Supreme-Court

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is one sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” It was ratified in 1868. The Supreme Court interpreted it — clearly, and with essentially the meaning everyone has understood it to have for over a century — in 1898. Nobody seriously disputed what it meant for 128 years. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that meaning and struck down Trump’s executive order trying to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented and temporary-visa immigrants. That’s the good news. The bad news is what it took to get there, and what three sitting justices were willing to argue in order to reach the opposite conclusion. ...

For ninety years, a single 1935 precedent stood between the president and total control over the officials who regulate the economy: the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve, the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission. Presidents could not simply fire the people who ran these agencies because they disagreed with a ruling or wanted a loyalist in the seat. Congress built them to be insulated — for cause removal only, not at-will. On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court ended that. And in the very same batch of opinions, it decided the rule didn’t apply to the one agency that matters most to financial markets. ...

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has a founding myth. It goes like this: unlike liberal justices who impose their policy preferences onto the Constitution, conservative justices are constrained by the original meaning of the text — what the Founders wrote, what the ratifiers understood. Originalism, in this telling, is not an ideology. It is a discipline. It is the difference between judges who follow the law and judges who make it up. It is a compelling story. It is also, the evidence shows, false. ...

A Court Divided: LGBTQ Rights and Minority Protections in the Balance The Supreme Court does not move in a straight line. Over the past six years, it has handed down decisions that protected LGBTQ workers from job discrimination, then carved out a constitutional escape hatch for businesses that do not want to serve same-sex couples. It has eliminated the federal right to abortion, while a Justice in the majority hinted that marriage equality might be next. Now a new wave of cases is approaching, and the question is no longer hypothetical: what kind of court is this, and who is it for? ...

The Supreme Court ruled today — February 20, 2026 — that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not give the President the power to impose tariffs. The vote was 6-3. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority. The Court’s most sweeping executive trade action in modern history has been struck down as unconstitutional overreach. The case is Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, consolidated with V.O.S. Selections v. United States. The ruling vacates the Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariffs — the sweeping duties imposed in April 2025 on imports from dozens of countries — and remands the question of refunds to the U.S. Court of International Trade. More than $160 billion in IEEPA tariff revenue has been collected since January 2025. The fight over who gets it back, and how, is now just beginning. ...

Who Owns the Machine’s Work? AI, Copyright, and the Supreme Court’s Coming Reckoning The legal system is struggling to answer a question that would have seemed like science fiction just a decade ago: when an artificial intelligence creates something — a painting, a news article, a piece of code — who owns it? And when an AI system trains itself by reading millions of copyrighted works without permission, has it stolen something? ...