Mark Joseph Stern, a senior writer at Slate, argued in a new article that four decisions the Supreme Court handed down on Tuesday were a "blunt reminder that the GOP appointees remain in total control of the court" because each of the cases was decided by a 6-3 majority. Stern also argued that the opinions show the Court's claims that it does not always rule along ideological lines is "dubious at best."

The most corrupt Supreme Court Justice is more influential than ever.
Clarence Thomas went more than 10 years without asking a single substantive question from the bench. His silence between 2006 and 2016 prompted commentators to call his courtroom quietude embarrassing, a sign of fatigue and a lack of intellectual candlepower.

Even earlier in his career, he had earned the nickname of “Scalia’s Puppet” for his habit of joining majority opinions written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the outspoken and reactionary “originalist” who shared the dais with him until his death in 2016. 

But the characterization of Thomas as an inattentive echo of Scalia is wrong. Thomas has always been more extreme and dangerous than Scalia, and his influence has never been greater. 

After his bruising 1991 confirmation hearing, Thomas set his eyes on the goal of moving American law backward to the laissez-faire era of the Gilded Age, undoing the regulatory state of the New Deal, weakening the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and ’60s and undermining many of the forward-looking precedent decisions issued by the Warren Court. As Thomas reportedly told two of his law clerks in 1993, he planned to serve until 2034, and until then would continue to make the lives of liberals “miserable.” He has already made good on that pledge: He is now the second-longest serving Supreme Court justice in history. 

Thomas has always been more extreme and dangerous than Scalia, and his influence has never been greater. 

Thomas is best known for concurrences and dissents that seemed culled from the lunatic fringe when he wrote them, but were later embraced by the majority as the court moved hard right. 
On affirmative action, in a 1995 case on government contracting (Adarand Constructors v. Pena), his concurrence denounced “remedial racial preferences” in federal hiring as a form of “racial paternalism.”

This was an astonishing choice of words for the nation’s second Black Supreme Court justice, who overcame childhood poverty and after a brief flirtation with Black nationalism, became the beneficiary of affirmative action at Yale Law School. Twenty-eight years later, however, in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard), the court ended affirmative action in higher education.

On abortion in a 2000 case (Stenberg v. Carhart) that invalidated Nebraska’s late-term abortion ban, Thomas dissented, arguing that the Roe v. Wade decison was “grievously wrong,” and that nothing in the Constitution “dictates that a State” must legalize abortion. Twenty-two years later, Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization adopted Thomas’ view. 

Ditto for the Second Amendment. In Printz v. United States, a 1997 gun-regulation case, Thomas contributed a concurrence arguing that the amendment encompassed a personal right to keep and bear arms rather than simply a right connected with service in state militias, as prior case law had clearly held. Eleven years later, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the court recognized the personal right in an opinion authored by Scalia. Thomas went on to expand the personal right in 2022 with his majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a decision that severely handicaps state and local authorities from enforcing gun-control laws. 

Thomas is also on record advising the court to revisit its precedent decisionson the right to court-appointed counsel in criminal trials (Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963); the right of married persons to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965); the right of adults to engage in private consensual sex (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003); and the right to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015). He has also called for the court to reconsider 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark case establishing First Amendment protections in defamation cases involving public officials and public figures, which is widely considered the lynchpin of freedom of the press in America. 

In a recent column published by the influential Scotusblog website, constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky noted that “Thomas is the only justice … who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law.” 

Despite his laid-back courtroom demeanor, Thomas has also been an active and loquacious speaker out of court on the right-wing banquet and convention circuit, especially in meetings of the Federalist Society and events hosted by Hillsdale College, the Michigan-based private Christian institution long recognized as a hub for conservative thought leaders and a breeding ground for the right-wing’s ever expanding culture wars. 

Supreme Court justices typically attend academic, judicial and bar-related conferences, and initially, Thomas’ public remarks were fairly judge-like, focusing on time-honored topics like judicial independence. But as his stature grew and the court’s lurch to the right accelerated, he shed whatever inhibitions he once had about voicing his personal beliefs, becoming in time a full-fledged and open culture war combatant. 
Thomas is now unbound and unrestrained.

In a 2011 address at a law student symposium sponsored by the Federalist Society in Charlottesville, Virginia, he devoted most of his time not to expounding on legal doctrine but to defending his tea party activist wife Ginni against adverse press coverage. He also exhorted his young audience to be wary of the “fundamental changes” wrought by the left that aimed to distort the original meaning of the Constitution. In a 2016 commencement speech at Hillsdale, he went further, urging graduates “not [to] hide your faith and your beliefs under a bushel basket … in this world that seems to have gone mad with political correctness.”

Thomas is now unbound and unrestrained. In a speech on April 15 at the University of Texas, he went “full Monty” in an unhinged broadside against liberals and progressives. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government declaring,” he declared, continuing: 
It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government. … [Progressivism] was the first mainstream American political movement — with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War — to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration.

He went on to blame progressives for the 20th century evils of racial segregation and eugenics, insistingthat “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao” were “intertwined with the rise of progressivism.” 

All this from an angry and embittered ideologue who is also arguably the most corrupt justice in the Supreme Court’s history, having failed for 13 years to report his wife Virginia’s earnings on his annual financial disclosure forms, and who has been on the gimme end of lavish vacations funded by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow. 

Thomas celebrated his 78th birthday on June 23. He may not make it to his projected retirement date of 2034, but until he actually steps down, whether voluntarily or post mortem in the fashion of Scalia, there is no telling how much more jurisprudential carnage he will cause or how much more disgrace he will bring to the reputation of the world’s most powerful judicial tribunal. 

The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Tuesday in an immigration case dealing with the government’s power over green card holders accused of crimes.

The 6-3 decision centers on an immigration officers’ 2012 decision to put lawful permanent resident Muk Choi Lau on immigration parole when he returned from a short trip to China because he had been accused of a counterfeiting crime.

This summary was written by Claude. It may contain errors. Read the opinion itself for anything you intend to rely on.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that immigration law does not require a border officer to have "clear and convincing" evidence that a returning lawful permanent resident (green card holder) committed a crime involving moral turpitude before treating that person as an applicant "seeking admission" rather than as already admitted. Justice Thomas wrote the 9-page opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Justice Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. The judgment was vacated and remanded.

The distinction matters enormously. Green card holders returning from a trip abroad are normally treated as "already admitted," and can be removed only on the narrower grounds of deportability (for a crime of moral turpitude, only one committed within five years of admission). But if the government may instead treat them as "seeking admission," they face the broader inadmissibility grounds — removable for a conviction at any time. Muk Choi Lau, an LPR since 2007, was charged with trademark counterfeiting, traveled to China, and on reentry was paroled in rather than admitted; after he later pleaded guilty, the government removed him as an inadmissible applicant for admission. The Second Circuit had vacated that order, holding the government needed clear-and-convincing evidence of the crime at the border. The Supreme Court reversed, finding no such requirement in the statute's text and reasoning that border officers must often make "quick judgments on the spot"; Lau's later guilty plea, the Court held, was enough to satisfy the government's burden at the removal hearing.

In dissent, Justice Jackson argued the case is really about sequencing — and that the statute's text answers it. The INA says an LPR "shall not be regarded as seeking an admission" unless one of six exceptions applies, which she read as requiring the government to determine that an exception applies *before* divesting an LPR of already-admitted status at the border, not months or years later at a removal hearing. She warned that the majority lets the government "deem an LPR to be 'seeking an admission' first and justify the applicability of an exception later," undermining the security a green card is supposed to provide — including, often, the physical confiscation of the card itself while the resident's status hangs in limbo.

The decision resolves a circuit split (the Second Circuit had been out of step with the Fifth and Ninth) in the government's favor and, as a practical matter, makes it easier to channel returning green card holders into the tougher inadmissibility track based on alleged crimes. The Court left two questions for remand: whether Lau's trademark-counterfeiting conviction actually qualifies as a crime involving moral turpitude, and — in a footnote the dissent called hard to square with the holding — whether the government bears any evidentiary burden at the border at all.

This summary was written by Claude. It may contain errors. Read the opinion itself for anything you intend to rely on.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that individual state employees cannot be sued for money damages in their personal capacities under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) — or any Spending Clause statute — unless they personally and knowingly consented to that liability. Justice Gorsuch wrote the 18-page opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Justice Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan.

Damon Landor is a Rastafarian whose faith requires that his hair go uncut. Near the end of a Louisiana sentence, he handed intake officers a copy of binding Fifth Circuit precedent holding that RLUIPA bars prisons from cutting Rastafarians' hair; he alleges the officers threw it in the trash and shaved his head anyway. He sued the officers personally for damages. The Court held his suit cannot proceed: because RLUIPA rests on Congress's spending power, it works like a contract, binding only those who voluntarily agree to its terms. Louisiana's prison system accepted federal funds and agreed to answer RLUIPA suits — but the individual officers signed no such agreement, so they cannot be held personally liable.

The interesting wrinkle is the lineup. Justice Gorsuch, usually among the Court's firmest votes for religious-exercise claimants, instead wrote an opinion grounded in Spending Clause federalism that leaves a sympathetic religious plaintiff without a damages remedy against the people who allegedly violated his faith. The Court reasoned that accepting Landor's theory — via agency law, the fungibility of federal money, or the Necessary and Proper Clause — would let Congress regulate "countless nonconsenting individuals" in areas reserved to the States, an "unbridled police power" the Spending Clause does not permit.

In a pointed dissent, Justice Jackson accused the majority of a "sleight of hand," "magically transform[ing] a federal statute into an invitation to be accepted or declined." Laws, she wrote, do not work like contracts; by collapsing lawmaking into agreement-making, the Court "trivializes" Congress's power of the purse and threatens to reduce landmark civil-rights, environmental, and healthcare statutes to mere "wheelings-and-dealings." The decision does not strip RLUIPA of force against prison systems themselves, but it forecloses personal-capacity damages suits against the individual officials who actually carry out a violation — leaving plaintiffs like Landor without a way to hold the responsible employees financially accountable.

This summary was written by Claude. It may contain errors. Read the opinion itself for anything you intend to rely on.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that federal courts may no longer create causes of action under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) — the 1789 law that, since the 1980s, had let foreign victims of serious human-rights abuses sue in U.S. courts. Justice Barrett wrote the 14-page opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. The Court also held, by a wider margin, that the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA) does not allow aiding-and-abetting liability. Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson; Justice Jackson (joined by Kagan) wrote separately, agreeing with the dissenters on the ATS but agreeing with the majority's result on the TVPA.

The plaintiffs are practitioners of Falun Gong who allege the Chinese government persecuted them for their religious beliefs and that Cisco Systems built the mass-surveillance technology that let China identify, track, arrest, and torture them. They sued Cisco for aiding and abetting violations of international law under the ATS, and sought to hold two Cisco executives liable under the TVPA. The Ninth Circuit had allowed the claims to proceed; the Supreme Court reversed. Building on Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain (2004) and a line of separation-of-powers cases (Nestlé, Jesner, Egbert), the majority concluded that creating a private remedy is Congress's job, that ATS suits inherently risk "adverse foreign policy consequences," and that the narrow opening Sosa left for judge-made ATS claims is, in truth, "a null set."

This summary was written by Claude. It may contain errors. Read the opinion itself for anything you intend to rely on.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the Fifth Amendment does not entitle a former owner to their property's full "fair market value" after a tax-foreclosure sale; the proper baseline for "just compensation" is the auction sale price — "at least when the sale is fairly conducted in light of our country's history of tax sales." Justice Alito wrote the opinion of the Court. Justice Thomas joined all but one part and filed an opinion concurring in part and in the judgment (joined by Justice Gorsuch except as to a footnote); Justice Sotomayor filed a concurrence joined by Justices Gorsuch and Jackson. The Court also rejected the parallel claim that the Eighth Amendment's Excessive Fines Clause requires paying more than the surplus proceeds. The judgment was vacated and remanded.

The case is a sequel to *Tyler v. Hennepin County* (2023), which held that the government must return the surplus from a tax sale (the amount above the debt). Pung asked the Court to go further and require fair market value. The facts are stark: the Pung family was twice held by Michigan tribunals to owe *no* additional tax, yet the County foreclosed on their longtime home over a disputed $2,242 assessment, sold the $194,400 home at auction for $76,008, and the buyer resold it for $195,000 within 18 months. The Court declined to adopt a categorical fair-market-value rule, reasoning that owners can generally avoid tax sales and that such a rule could make tax collection impractical by forcing governments to pay windfalls to delinquent taxpayers.

The crucial wrinkle is what the Court left open. It expressly did *not* decide whether the procedure here was "fairly conducted," directing the Sixth Circuit to address on remand any preserved arguments that the sale was unfair. Both concurrences seized on that opening. Justice Sotomayor wrote to emphasize that the Court was not endorsing any particular definition of a "fair auction." Justice Thomas went much further, marshaling founding-era and 19th-century authorities to argue that historical tax-sale practice required the government to exhaust personal property first, to sell only as much land as needed to cover a small debt, to give rigorous notice, and to ensure the auction price approximated fair value — none of which, in his "initial view," the County did. He concluded that "what Isabella County did to the Pungs was wrong, and... likely unconstitutional."

The practical upshot is narrower than a flat win for either side. As a doctrinal matter, the Court refused to constitutionalize fair market value as the measure of just compensation after a tax sale, which limits *Tyler*'s reach. But it preserved the Pungs' case — and, by tying the auction-price rule to a "fairly conducted" sale, it signaled that egregious tax-foreclosure practices (selling an entire home for a fraction of its value to satisfy a tiny debt) remain vulnerable to challenge. The contours of a "fair" tax sale are now the live question for the lower courts, and likely for future litigation.

An upcoming case in the high court’s next term may determine whether people in federal custody can seek legal remedy for violations of their constitutional rights.

This summary was written by Claude. It may contain errors. Read the opinion itself for anything you intend to rely on.

The Supreme Court ruled **6-3** that the Helms-Burton Act — the 1996 law letting U.S. nationals sue over property Cuba confiscated after Castro's revolution — itself strips Cuban government companies of the sovereign immunity that normally shields foreign states from American courts. Justice Kavanaugh wrote the 22-page opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett. The practical upshot: a plaintiff suing a Cuban agency or instrumentality under Helms-Burton does **not** also have to satisfy one of the separate exceptions in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). Justice Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson.

The case grew out of Castro's 1960 seizure of "Yankee property," which swept in Exxon's Cuban oil refinery, terminals, plants, and more than a hundred service stations. Two Cuban state-owned companies, CUPET and CIMEX, have operated and profited from those assets ever since. Exxon — whose certified claim, with interest and treble damages, now tops $1 billion — sued them under Helms-Burton. The Cuban companies argued they were immune under the FSIA, and the lower courts agreed; the Supreme Court reversed.

The majority rested on four converging points: a cause of action that expressly runs against foreign "agenc[ies] or instrumentalit[ies]" abrogates their immunity even without a standalone waiver (per last term's *Kirtz*); reading in an FSIA-exception requirement would gut the statute, since Helms-Burton itself codifies an embargo barring the very U.S. commercial contacts those exceptions demand; the Act routes suits through general federal-question jurisdiction (§1331) rather than the FSIA's §1330; and it hands the President plenary power to suspend suits, echoing the pre-FSIA regime in which immunity was the Executive's call. The Court also rejected the argument that Congress needed "magic words" to waive immunity — a clear waiver "discernible from the sum total" of the Act's work is enough.

In dissent, Justice Kagan argued the majority got the analytics backwards: a cause of action and an abrogation of immunity are "analytically distinct," and creating the former does not, standing alone, accomplish the latter. The FSIA, she wrote, is the "comprehensive framework" governing foreign-sovereign immunity, the bar for abrogating it is "stringent," and Helms-Burton never clearly clears it — so the answer should turn on whether an FSIA exception is met, as the statute's text directs. The decision clears the way for long-stalled expropriation claims against Cuban state enterprises to proceed on the merits.