2 Supreme Court Cases to Watch This Month
Plus: This week in legal history.
The U.S. Supreme Court's 2026–2027 term officially kicks off on Monday. But you may be forgiven if you didn't realize the justices had actually gone away on a summer break. After all, the Court has certainly stayed busy enough over the past two months, issuing a number of high-profile orders and opinions on issues ranging from President Donald Trump's efforts to restrict the use of mail-in ballots to the president's ongoing construction of a new White House ballroom.
Those cases, however, were all from the Supreme Court's emergency docket, sometimes also known among its critics as the shadow docket. The Court's regular docket, in which the justices only decide cases after reading several rounds of briefs and hearing lengthy oral arguments, was in fact on pause over the summer. That pause will be lifted on Monday when oral arguments start again.
So what's coming on the regular docket? Here are two notable cases that I'll be watching this month.
You’re reading Injustice System from Damon Root and Reason. Get more of Damon’s commentary on constitutional law and American history.
1. Suncor Energy, Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. County officials in Colorado sued Suncor Energy for damages under Colorado law over injuries allegedly caused by the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The energy company countered by arguing that this kind of state lawsuit is preempted by federal law because the alleged conduct at issue did not originate in Colorado. In other words, if a state seeks to sue an energy company under state law over damages allegedly caused by interstate or even international pollution or greenhouse gas emissions, may the state lawsuit proceed, or must it be dropped because federal law, not state law, controls?
Needless to say, the importance of this case for future climate change-related litigation is significant. Oral arguments are scheduled for October 5.
2. Salazar v. Paramount Global. The Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 (VPPA), which was passed after a video store clerk leaked to a journalist a list of films that then-Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork had rented, prohibits a "video tape service provider" from "knowingly disclos[ing], to any person, personally identifiable information concerning any consumer of such provider." At issue in this case is whether Paramount Global, doing business as the website 247Sports, violated this federal law when it shared user Michael Salazar's private information, including what videos he watched, with Facebook.
Here is how that legal question is presented in the case: "whether the phrase 'goods or services from a video tape service provider,' as used in the VPPA's definition of 'consumer,' refers to all of a video tape service provider's goods or services or only to its audiovisual goods or services."
In short, this is a case with big ramifications for both the digital privacy of consumers and the business practices of tech companies. Oral arguments are scheduled for October 14.
This Week in Legal History
On September 30, 1857—169 years ago yesterday—Justice Benjamin Curtis resigned from the Supreme Court in protest over its decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the notorious case that held that African Americans "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Curtis was one of two dissenters in Dred Scott, and his judicial objections still make for illuminating reading today.
The Dred Scott opinion was written by Chief Justice Roger Taney. He held that neither Scott nor any other black person could ever count as a U.S. citizen because they were, in Taney's words, "beings of an inferior order" who could never qualify as any part of that "We the People" for whom the U.S. Constitution was written. Black Americans "are not included, and were not intended to be included," Taney asserted, "under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution."
Writing in dissent, Curtis laid bare the historical illiteracy of Taney's argument. "At the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation," Curtis noted, "all free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the other necessary qualifications possessed the franchise of electors, on equal terms with other citizens." In other words, when the Constitution was up for ratification, a number of black Americans were literally among the "We the People" who brought the document into existence because they were among the ratifying populations of those five ratifying states.
Taney's opinion is now widely remembered as among the Supreme Court's very worst. It's also worth remembering Curtis' wise dissent, which opposed Taney's crimes against the Constitution in real time.