Supreme Court begins new term: Five issues to watch

The Supreme Court will return to the bench Monday to start its new term, where battles over transgender rights, guns and adult website use are already brewing. 

So far, the court has agreed to review 43 appeals, with decisions expected by summer.

Although court watchers have called the upcoming term sleepier than others in recent memory, the justices are still poised to issue key rulings, and additional cases are expected to be added to their docket this fall.  

Here are five big issues to watch at the Supreme Court this term. 

Gender-affirming care

In the next potentially blockbuster Supreme Court case implicating LGBTQ protections, the justices are set to decide the constitutionality of gender-affirming care bans for minors in a case around a Tennessee law.

The Biden administration challenged Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care as violating transgender people’s equal protection rights. The case stands to impact laws passed by Republican-led legislatures in nearly half the country. 

“The laws are inflicting profound harms on transgender adolescents and their families by denying medical treatments that the affected adolescents, their parents, their doctors, and medical experts have all concluded are appropriate and necessary to treat a serious medical condition,” the Justice Department wrote in court filings. 

The case has already attracted friend-of-the-court briefs from dozens of outside groups, and the number is likely to grow this coming week when Tennessee has a deadline to lay out its arguments in writing. 

“We fought hard to defend Tennessee's law protecting kids from irreversible gender treatments and secured a thoughtful and well-reasoned opinion from the Sixth Circuit,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti (R) said when the court agreed to hear the case. 

“I look forward to finishing the fight in the United States Supreme Court. This case will bring much-needed clarity to whether the Constitution contains special protections for gender identity,” he added. 

Guns 

The Supreme Court will again deal with guns this term, but neither of the two cases they have agreed to hear implicates the Second Amendment. 

On Tuesday, the justices will hear oral arguments about whether federal law authorized President Biden’s administration to crack down on “ghost guns,” which are self-assembled weapons that are difficult to trace. 

The Justice Department appealed to the high court after a lower panel invalidated the regulations, siding with a group of firearm owners, gun rights groups and firearm manufacturers that sued over the rules. 

Later this term, the Supreme Court separately will weigh in on the scope of the gun industry’s immunity under a controversial federal law passed in 2005. 

A group of prominent U.S. gun makers contends the statute precludes Mexico’s multibillion-dollar lawsuit over allegations the companies caused a flood of guns to fall into the hands of Mexican cartels. 

The court agreed to hear the gun industry’s appeal Friday alongside roughly a dozen other cases that will fill out much of the justices’ docket this term. 

Porn website use 

At some point this term, the justices will consider the adult entertainment industry’s challenge to a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify the age of their users.  

The law, signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), requires pornography sites to use age-verification measures to ensure visitors are at least 18 years old. It also requires the sites to post health warnings about porn, including that it’s addictive, impairs development and increases the demand for prostitution and child exploitation — which the industry, represented by the Free Speech Coalition, disputes. 

A federal judge previously blocked the age verification requirement and warnings as unconstitutional, but in March, a split panel on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling on age verification. It upheld the lower court’s ruling on health warnings, finding that porn sites can’t be forced to publish warnings about their content. 

The justices’ decision on the matter could have sweeping implications for First Amendment protections, threatening to upend past precedent that the speech rights of adults outweigh potential harms to minors.  

Environment 

The justices will also weigh a handful of environmental cases with the potential to further erode agency powers, a theme of the Supreme Court’s previous term. 

On Friday, the court agreed to settle a dispute over plans to store nuclear waste at a Texas facility for 40 years.  

Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, has vocally opposed the dumping site, licensed by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Whatever the court decides could affect plans for a similar facility in New Mexico, whose Democratic governor also opposes storing spent fuel in the state.  

The government has argued that siding with Texas could threaten the NRC’s powers to license storage, upending decades of federal nuclear policy.  

Also on the justices’ docket is a case brought by San Francisco against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) challenging federal water pollution requirements. 

The city asserts that an EPA wastewater permit for one of its sewage treatment plants included overly vague requirements which are nearly impossible to follow. But the language is widely used in permits for municipalities across the country, and a ruling in the city’s favor stands to weaken the environmental agency’s ability to control contamination. 

A third environmental case asks the justices to limit the federal government’s ability to weigh climate change or other environmental impacts when considering whether to approve infrastructure projects.  

Vaping

For the vaping industry, this Supreme Court term is shaping up to be perhaps the most consequential yet. 

Oral arguments have not yet been scheduled, but the justices this term are set to review the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) marketing denial of two companies that sell flavored tobacco vaping products. 

The FDA found the companies failed to offer reliable and robust evidence to overcome the risks of youth addiction and show a benefit to adult smokers. 

After the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the rejections were unlawful, the agency appealed to the high court to defend its decisions. 

On Friday, the Supreme Court said it would add another vape-related case to its docket.   

The Biden administration contends the 5th Circuit is impermissibly allowing the industry to funnel its challenges there. Widely regarded as the nation’s most conservative federal appeals court, the 5th Circuit has become an attractive venue for such lawsuits.