Major Supreme Court cases from the 2024–25 term

The United States Supreme Court issued a number of significant decisions in its 2024–25 term, which began on October 7, 2024, and ended on June 27, 2025. By July 26, 2024, the Court had added fewer than 30 cases to the term, though it added more cases on October 4 and continued to evaluate petitions for review. Among the questions presented in the cases added were: whether so-called “ghost guns,” or firearms that are assembled from kits or separately sold parts, can be regulated by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF); whether a person on death row in Oklahoma deserves a new trial because prosecutors concealed the fact that their key witness was under psychiatric care; whether the manufacturer of a pain reliever whose unlisted ingredients included THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the active chemical constituent of marijuana, can be sued under RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (1970); whether a Tennessee law prohibiting gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and whether federal courts are empowered under federal law to issue nationwide injunctions.

Below are detailed descriptions of seven major cases argued before the Supreme Court during its 2024–25 term, followed by a list of seven additional cases argued in 2024–25.

Garland v. VanDerStok

Argued on October 8, 2024. Following the assassinations in the 1960s of Pres. John F. Kennedy, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., Congress passed, and Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law, the Gun Control Act (GCA) of 1968, which empowers the federal government to impose a variety of regulations on the sale, purchase, and possession of firearms. Under the GCA businesses engaged in the manufacture or sale of firearms must be licensed by the federal government, and licensed sellers of firearms must perform background checks on individual buyers and maintain records on firearms sales, including the serial numbers of purchased handguns or rifles. The GCA, as amended, also bans or restricts the commercial sale of firearms to persons who have been convicted of certain felonies, committed to mental institutions (or legally determined to be “a mental defective”), or subject to domestic-violence restraining orders. In 2022 the ATF issued a rule clarifying that certain products that can be readily converted into guns or rifles qualified as “firearms” under the GCA’s definition of that term, thus ensuring that manufacturers and sellers of gun kits and parts would be subject to the same regulations applied to manufacturers and sellers of regular firearms. In June 2023 a federal district court in Texas vacated the ATF’s new rule, claiming that it was facially inconsistent with the GCA. The Biden administration then asked the Supreme Court to stay the district court’s decision, arguing in part that the failure to regulate gun kits and parts would increase the number firearms that are untraceable for lack of serial numbers or possessed by persons who would not have passed a background check. Having issued a stay in August, the Court again sided with the Biden administration in October, temporarily freezing the district court’s modified decision preventing the ATF from using its rule to regulate the two companies that brought the original suit. After the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court’s original rulingin November, the Biden administration filed a writ of certiorari (petition for review) with the Supreme Court, which agreed in April 2024 to hear the case in its next term, scheduling oral arguments for October 8. On March 26, 2025, the Court reversed and remanded the Fifth Circuit’s decision. In a majority opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Court held that the ATF’s rule was not facially inconsistent with the GCA and thus could be used to regulate the manufacture and sale of at least some ghost guns.

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Glossip v. Oklahoma

Argued on October 9, 2024. In 1998 Richard Glossip, the former manager of a motel in Oklahoma City, was sentenced to death by an Oklahoma state court for the murder of the motel’s owner, Barry Van Treese, by Justin Sneed, the motel’s maintenance worker. (After Glossip’s conviction was overturned on the grounds of ineffective counsel, he was retried and convicted again in 2004.) Glossip’s conviction was based entirely on Sneed’s testimony, in which he spared himself the death penalty by claiming that Glossip had offered him $10,000 to kill Van Treese. Some four months before his scheduled execution in May 2023, Glossip received information indicating that Sneed had falsely testified that he had not seen a psychiatrist—when in fact he was under treatment for a bipolar disorder that rendered him “potentially violent,” a condition likely exacerbated by his consumption of methamphetamine—and that prosecutors had been concealing evidence of Sneed’s psychiatric care. On that basis the state attorney general joined Glossip in asking the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (OCCA), the state’s highest criminal court, to overturn Glossip’s conviction and sentence. After the OCCA rejected their request, Glossip asked the Supreme Court to stay his execution and soon afterward filed a writ of certiorari to appeal the OCCA’s decision. The Court issued a stay in May 2023 and, after numerous conferences, finally agreed to hear the case in its 2024–25 term, scheduling oral arguments for October 9, 2024. On February 25, 2025, the Court reversed and remanded the OCCA’s ruling. In a majority opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Court held that the prosecution’s failure to correct Sneed’s false testimony and its concealment of evidence confirming Sneed’s psychiatric care violated Glossip’s right to due process of law under the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), in keeping with the Court’s 1959 ruling in Napue v. Illinois.

Medical Marijuana v. Horn

Argued on October 15, 2024. In September 2012 Douglas Horn, a commercial truck driver who suffered chronic pain and inflammation resulting from a trucking accident earlier that year, began using Dixie X, a cannabidiol (CBD)-based medication widely used as a pain reliever and as treatment for epilepsy, insomnia, and anxiety. CBD is among about 80 known cannabis-plant compounds that are responsible for the physical and psychological effects that result from the consumption of marijuana or hemp and their derivatives. CBD products derived from hemp, however, contain very little THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient of marijuana, and are thus exempt from federal antimarijuana laws. Horn was naturally concerned that even a small amount of THC in Dixie X might register in the regular drug testing to which he was subject, causing him to lose his job. Accordingly, he sought to confirm that Dixie X contained “0% THC”—as he had read in a magazine article—by watching YouTube videos, reading the frequently asked questions (FAQ) page on the Dixie X website, and asking his wife to call the customer-service line of one of the Dixie X manufacturers. Assured that he would not lose his job, Horn used Dixie X into October, when he was selected for a drug test. He failed the test and lost his job. After confirming the presence of THC in an independent lab test, Horn filed a civil lawsuit in federal court against Medical Marijuana and other manufacturers, charging the companies with several violations of New York state law—including deceptive business practices and “fraudulent inducement”—and an additional breach of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (1970), or RICO, which in part authorizes civil lawsuits against organizations or businesses for corrupt or otherwise illegal actions resulting in damage to “business or property.” In April 2019 Horn withdrew three of the counts in his suit, and the federal court dismissed nearly all of the rest. Regarding the RICO charge, the court later ruled that Horn’s firing did not constitute business or property damage but was merely a “personal injury” that was not a proper cause of action under RICO. Upon Horn’s appeal, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s decision, holding that Horn’s loss of employment, salary, and pension amounted to business or property damage that resulted from, but was not itself, a personal injury. In October 2023 the companies that Horn had sued under RICO filed a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court, which agreed in April 2024 to hear the case in its next term, scheduling oral arguments for October 15. On April 2, 2025, the Supreme Court affirmed the Second Circuit’s ruling. In a majority opinion written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Court acknowledged that RICO “implicitly den[ies] a remedy for personal injuries” but found nevertheless that the statute does not prohibit a remedy “for business and property loss that derives from a personal injury.”

United States v. Skrmetti

Argued on December 4, 2024. In March 2023 Tennessee joined several other U.S. states in adopting a law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth (i.e., transgender persons under the age of 18), including hormone treatments and gender-transition surgeries. The statute, Senate Bill 1 (SB1), prohibits “medical procedures from being administered to or performed on minors” in order to “enable a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to “treat purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.” The particular procedures banned by the legislation include “surgically removing, modifying, altering, or entering into tissues, cavities, or organs” and “prescribing, administering, or dispensing any puberty blocker or hormone.” SB1 also afforded two limited exceptions to the general ban on hormonal treatment, permitting the use of hormones or puberty blockers for “a minor’s congenital defect, disease, or physical injury” and allowing the continued treatment—but only until March 31, 2024—of a minor whose “medical procedure…began prior to the effective date of this act” (July 1, 2023). In April 2023 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of three transgender children and their families, as well as a Memphis-based physician who provided gender-affirming care. The suit requested a preliminary injunction to prevent SB1’s bans from going into effect in July, arguing that the law violated both the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment through its discrimination on the basis of sex (allowing hormone treatment only for cisgender youth) and its violation of the fundamental right of parents to make medical decisions for their children. The court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the law’s ban on gender-transition surgery because none of the children involved were set to undergo such treatment, but it agreed with the challenges to the hormone and puberty-blocker bans, holding that the associated provisions of SB1 were in fact “facially unconstitutional.” In September 2023 a divided panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s injunction, reinstating SB1 and a similar ban in Kentucky that had been adopted and legally challenged at about the same time. The SB1 challengers, joined by the Biden administration, appealed the case to the Supreme Court. In June 2024 the Court granted the administration’s writ of certiorari disputing the Sixth Circuit’s decision, agreeing to hear the case in its next term.

On June 18, 2025, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., the Court affirmed the Sixth Circuit’s ruling on the ground that the two classifications used in SB1 in service of the law’s objectives—namely, age (minors versus adults) and medical use (the use of medications to treat gender-related conditions suffered by transgender children)—deserved only “rational review” and not “intermediate” or “heightened scrutiny.” Under rational review, a law may be upheld if it does not restrict a fundamental right or affect only a specific class of people; under intermediate scrutiny, a law may be upheld if it serves an important government objective and its discriminatory provisions are closely related to the law’s objective; and under heightened scrutiny, a law is unconstitutional if its classifications include race, alien status, or national origin. Although laws containing classifications based on sex are typically subject to intermediate scrutiny, SB1 itself does not require such a justification, in the Court’s judgment, because its classifications are not based on sex. “Rather, SB1 prohibits healthcare providers from administering puberty blockers and hormones to minors for certain medical uses, regardless of a minor’s sex.” And because the law’s classifications are rationally related to its objective of protecting the health of minors, SB1 satisfies rational review and should therefore be upheld. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that SB1 should be subject to intermediate scrutiny because it “expressly classifies on the basis of sex” through its sex-based identification of minors subject to the law’s restrictions. For example, the law “prohibits doctors from prescribing certain medications to adolescents if (and only if) they will help a patient ‘identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.’” By “retreating” from intermediate review, she wrote, “the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims. In sadness, I dissent.”

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TikTok, Inc. and ByteDance LTD v. Garland

Argued on January 10, 2025. In April 2024 Congress passed, and Pres. Joe Biden signed into law, the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which (as its title indicates) bans the operation in the United States of Internet applications that are controlled by a “foreign adversary,” identified in standing federal legislation (10 U.S. Code §4872) as North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, and Iran. The act defines a “foreign adversary controlled application” in part as “a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” that is directly or indirectly operated by TikTok, Inc., ByteDance LTD (the Chinese parent company of TikTok), the adversaries identified in §4872, or any other company that is “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States.” The act was initiated out of concern that TikTok, a very popular social media platform allowing users to create and share homemade videos, collects personal data that could be used by the Chinese government (through its access to ByteDance) to track the locations and activities of individuals and to influence the attitudes and behavior of entire populations by manipulating available content. In order to avoid a complete ban on TikTok in the United States, ByteDance would have to sell TikTok to another parent company that is not under the control or influence of a foreign adversary by January 19, 2025. In response to the act, TikTok and ByteDance, as well as a group of American TikTok users, filed suit with the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, arguing that the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is unconstitutional because it violates the freedom of speech guaranteed to TikTok under the First Amendment. The appeals court rejected that argument, holding that the act satisfies the “strict scrutiny” standard applied by courts to laws or regulations that restrict fundamental constitutional rights or freedoms. Specifically, the court found that the restrictions under review serve a “compelling” governmental interest and are “narrowly tailored” to achieve that goal. The plaintiffs then appealed the circuit court’s ruling to the Supreme Court, which agreed in December 2024 to hear a consolidated case on a fast-track schedule in light of the imminent deadline imposed by the act. On January 17, 2025, the Court released an unsigned opinion affirming the constitutionality of the TikTok ban, holding that the law’s challenged provisions “do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.”

Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond

Argued on April 30, 2025. In 2023 the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, Oklahoma filed an application with the state to establish the country’s first religious charter school, the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. A charter school is a publicly funded, tuition-free, and relatively autonomous school that students can attend in place of traditional public or private schools. Under the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act of 1999, the state’s charter schools must be nonsectarian “in their programs, admissions policies, and other operations.” Although the declared purpose of the St. Isidore school was to serve as “a genuine instrument” of the Catholic church and to participate in the church’s “evangelizing mission,” the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the school’s application, signing a contract that permitted the school to freely exercise its religious beliefs. Prior to its scheduled opening in 2024, however, Oklahoma’s attorney general filed a suit with the state supreme court, arguing that the contract violated not only the Charter Schools Act but also the state constitution (which prohibits the use of public money for the benefit of “any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion” or any “sectarian institution”) and the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in favor of the attorney general, finding that St. Isidore school was a “state actor” and a “government entity” in view of its role in providing free public education “as a surrogate of the State.” The school and the state’s school board then filed appeals with the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing in part that the activities of private charter schools cannot be categorized as “state actions” merely because the schools are publicly funded—as the Supreme Court itself had decided in Rendell-Baker v. Kone (1982). The plaintiffs also argued that other more recent Supreme Court decisions indicate that the lower court’s ruling amounted to a violation of the First Amendment’s right to the free exercise of religion, given that it prohibited religious schools and their communities from participating in a beneficial government program available to all other applicants. In January 2025 the Court agreed to hear Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, consolidated with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, during its 2024–25 term, scheduling oral arguments for April 30, 2025. Notably, Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case, making it possible that the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s ruling could be effectively confirmed through a 4–4 vote. On May 23, the Court issued an unsigned and unexplained per curiam decision stating that “The judgment [of the Oklahoma Supreme Court] is affirmed by an equally divided Court.”

Trump v. CASA, Inc., et al.

Argued on May 15, 2025. On January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term as president of the United States, Donald Trump signed an executive order that, if allowed to stand, would end birthright citizenship in the United States (the unconditional granting of U.S. citizenship to any person born in the country), as established in citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside”) and the Nationality Act of 1940, which expressed the citizenship clause in legislative form. Trump’s order denied U.S. citizenship to any person born in the United States whose biological mother was unlawfully or only temporarily present in the United States and whose biological father was not a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident. Trump’s order was soon blocked in nationwide preliminary injunctions issued by federal district court judges. In March, after the relevant appellate courts refused to reverse or delay the injunctions, the Trump administration submitted emergency requests to the Supreme Court, asking that it delay the injunctions or at least limit their application to the states in which they were issued and the plaintiffs involved in the challenges. The emergency request was itself a general challenge to the power of district court judges to issue nationwide injunctions and only indirectly an argument in favor of rejecting the traditional interpretation of the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In April the Supreme Court declined to delay the injunctions but agreed to hear oral arguments regarding the emergency request on May 15.

On June 27, 2025, the Court found that “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.” On that basis, the Court agreed to “partially stay” the nationwide injunctions against the enforcement of Trump’s executive order, “but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.” The Court also emphasized that Trump’s emergency applications for delay of the injunctions “do not raise—and thus we do not address—the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause and the Nationality Act of 1940.” The effect of the Court’s ruling was to temporarily prevent the enforcement of Trump’s order against the plaintiffs challenging it in federal courts but to otherwise allow its enforcement pending the courts’ final decisions.

At a glance: members of the U.S. Supreme Court as of 2024

Additional cases

Other important cases that were argued during the Supreme Court’s 2024–25 term include:

• Argued on October 16, 2024. City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency—whether the Clean Water Act allows the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to subject permit holders under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System to penalties for violating water quality standards without identifying specific limits to which such discharges must conform. On March 4, 2025, the Court held that the water-quality standards imposed by the EPA were not authorized under the Clean Water Act.
• Argued on December 2, 2024. Food and Drug Administration v. Wages and White Lion Investments—whether the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals erred in its ruling setting aside an order by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) preventing the marketing of new e-cigarette products. In a unanimous decision issued on April 2, 2025, the Supreme Court vacated and remanded the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.
• Argued on December 10, 2024. Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado—whether the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires environmental impact studies conducted by a federal agency to extend beyond the proximate effects of actions over which the agency has regulatory authority. In an 8–0 decision issued on May 29, 2025 (Justice Neil Gorsuch had recused himself from the case), the Supreme Court held that the lower court had “incorrectly interpreted” NEPA to require such studies to consider the environmental effects of “separate projects” that may result from the project under review.
• Argued on January 15, 2024. Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton—whether the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals erred by upholding a Texas law requiring websites at least one-third of whose content is “harmful to minors” to verify the age of their users. On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court affirmed the Fifth Circuit’s decision, holding that age-verification would only “incidentally” burden the constitutionally protected speech of adults.
• Argued on March 4, 2025. Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos—whether billions of dollars in damages can be imposed on the U.S. firearms industry and whether significant gun-control measures can be enjoined by judges in the United States on the basis of Mexico’s contention that the industry’s practices have aided and abetted firearms trafficking to drug cartels in Mexico. In a unanimous decision issued on June 5, 2025, the Court ruled that Mexico’s contention had not been plausibly demonstrated under the established view of aiding and abetting as knowingly assisting in the commission of a crime. On that basis, the Court concluded that Mexico’s lawsuit is prohibited under the Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (2005), which permits such suits only if the arms manufacturer or seller “knowingly violated a…statute applicable to the sale or marketing” of firearms and the “violation was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought”—as would have been the case if the industry had genuinely “aided and abetted” the crimes committed by Mexican drug cartels.
• Argued on March 5, 2025. Nuclear Regulatory Commission v. Texas (consolidated with Interim Storage Partners, LLC v. Texas)—whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is permitted under federal statutes to license a private company to temporarily store spent nuclear fuel (i.e., nuclear waste) at a location away from the nuclear plant at which the spent fuel was generated. On June 18, the Court ruled that the licensing in this instance was permissible, because Texas and its partner companies, which had successfully challenged the NRC’s action, had not qualified as “parties” to the NRC’s licensing proceeding under the Hobbs Act and the Atomic Energy Act. The two laws together limit the right to judicial review of an NRC licensing decision to “aggrieved” parties, understood as persons or entities that had applied for an NRC license or had intervened in the relevant proceedings. Because the defendants had done neither, the Court ruled in favor of the NRC’s licensing decision.
• Argued on April 23, 2025 Diamond Alternative Energy v. Environmental Protection Agency—whether fuel producers have standing to sue the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for having approved regulations by the state of California that would require automakers to manufacture greater numbers of electric vehicles and fewer numbers of gasoline and diesel powered vehicles. On June 20, the Court ruled that fuel producers did have standing to sue, because reduced gasoline and diesel consumption would cause them “monetary injuries.”