A number of key issues — among them access to abortion and presidential immunity — could be decided by the Supreme Court in the coming days.
Editor's Note: FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine was decided on June 13, 2024. The Supreme Court ruled that doctors who opposed the abortion pill mifepristone lacked standing.
The term of the Supreme Court for 2024 expires. Decisions on many expected cases have already been dropped, but a number of key issues — access to abortion, presidential immunity — could be decided in the coming days.
Northeastern Global News spoke to Dan Urmandirector of law and public policy minor at Northeastern, who teaches courses on the Supreme Court, ahead of the expected rulings.
Here are five pending decisions with far-reaching implications that could be made in a matter of days.
At the top of many court watchers' lists is the pending decision in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which is about access to a commonly used abortion pill known as mifepristone. THE “abortion pill,” as it is commonly referred to, is used in up to 50% of abortions in the United States.
A group of doctors challenged the most recent Food and Drug Administration approvals of mifepristone in 2016 and 2021 that expanded access to the drug by allowing non-physician clinicians to prescribe it and patients to receive the pill through the mail.
Urman described the case as the first major abortion case since Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade — a landmark decision in 1973 that established the right to abortion.
“My sense is that the judges seemed quite skeptical of the doctors' position, and there's even a question of whether they have a position,” says Urman. “These are doctors who question a drug based on the likelihood that they will someday need to treat someone. so it was pretty weak, the connection; and generally, to be sued, there must be a specific, detectable injury to the party.'
“There's a chance that the court will say that this group of doctors didn't have standing to file the lawsuit, which could mean there's a future lawsuit when they're trying to find someone with standing,” Urman says. “It may get rid of the issue right now, but not permanently.”
Two relatively recent state laws — one in Florida, one in Texas — that appear to dictate social media policy are being challenged by a group of tech companies. The Florida law fined companies like Twitter/X, Facebook and YouTube for banning or otherwise censoring political candidates, while the Texas law allows citizens or the state attorney general to sue those platforms to remove political content from their websites.
Tech organizations NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association argue that tech companies have the First Amendment right to decide what content is allowed on their platforms.
“States are basically saying that social media is more like a public square, and when tech companies exercise control, what they're really doing is restricting speech,” Urman says.
Technology advocates see it quite differently.
“Social media companies are saying that, in reality, we are operating more like newspapers and should exercise editorial judgment — and, moreover, states exciting to post content we don't want to post.”
Urman says judges generally expressed skepticism about the state's laws.
The Supreme Court may be turning its back on its longstanding principle Respect to Chevron in a case involving a group of commercial fishermen. The group sued the National Marine Fisheries Service over a rule requiring fishermen to allow federal observers tasked with monitoring overfishing on their vessels. In addition, the fishery is required to pay the salaries of these observers.
The group is asking the Supreme Court to rule on whether a 1976 law from which the federal agency derived its authority to engage in such surveillance is a proper application of Chevron deference.
A ruling in favor of the group, which may be on the cards, could eliminate the principle of deferring to the agency's expertise, weakening the power of federal agencies and creating more work for the judiciary, Urman says.
“I think Chevron is either going to be overturned or severely limited, and that basically could tear up all kinds of regulations and clog up the courts,” says Urman, “because then the courts will be tasked with deciding whether an agency rule is reasonable as opposed to letting the agency decide.”
An important Second Amendment case will soon be decided in United States v. Rahimi. At issue is whether people subject to domestic violence prevention orders are allowed to own guns. Urman says the case is consequential because the high court, in recent years, has relied on a new standard to evaluate the validity of Second Amendment challenges: the “historical tradition” test.
The standard, experts and commentators Note, is a predictable development of the concept of originalism, practically applied. Essentially, the model reaches back into history to try to answer questions of contemporary relevance.
“In Rahimi, the court has to face how far they're willing to let originalism—or the text, history, and tradition—take it,” says Urman.
Originalism theory states that a legal text or statute must be interpreted through a lens that attempts to ascertain the “original meaning” — that is, the meaning as understood at the time the text or law was passed.
But Urman says the court seems ready to concede that when it comes to people with a history of violence, restrictions on gun ownership may be acceptable. “There's been a historical tradition of keeping dangerous people from having guns,” Urman says.
In one of the most anticipated rulings in US history, the Supreme Court is poised to decide whether presidents have immunity from prosecution for alleged acts committed while in office. The Supreme Court's review is in response to Trump's ongoing federal prosecution for alleged interference in the 2020 election while he was still in office, including events during and before the Jan. 6 attacks.
A resolution on the issue would determine whether pending cases, including two federal and one state (in Georgia), can proceed.
“It's almost impossible to imagine a trial for his efforts to interfere with the legal vote count on Jan. 6 before the November election — and if it started before the election, I don't think it would end before the election.” Urman says. “If the real goal was to delay, it accomplished that goal.”
Decisions in all five cases are expected sometime in June.