The Supreme Court on Monday morning added one new case to its docket for the 2026-27 term. The justices will hear arguments sometime in the fall on whether employees can bring lawsuits for sex discrimination under a federal law that applies to schools that receive federal funding.
Over a brief dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court also sent a pair of cases involving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act back to the lower courts for another look. And it turned down a group of cases challenging a government program that requires the Health and Human Services Secretary to negotiate Medicare drug prices.
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In a list of orders released on Monday from the justices’ May 14 conference, the court granted review in Crowther v. Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. The case began as a pair of lawsuits filed by an art professor and a women’s basketball coach at two public universities in Georgia, both alleging that they had been the victim of sex discrimination.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit threw out their claims. In an opinion by Chief Judge William Pryor, that court concluded that employees cannot bring lawsuits under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars sex discrimination by schools that receive federal funding. Pryor pointed to the text of the statute, which provides that “[n]o person … shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” “[N]othing about that language,” Pryor wrote, “indicates congressional intent to provide a private right of action to employees of educational institutions.”
The employees appealed to the Supreme Court, which asked the Trump administration to weigh in. In a brief filed on April 9, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer agreed that the court should take up the case. He sided with the university that the court of appeals’ decision was correct, but he contended that because the lower courts are divided on this question, the justices should nonetheless grant the employees’ petition for review.
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The court sent two cases, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe and State Board of Election Commissioners v. Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP, back to the lower courts for them to reconsider their earlier rulings in light of the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, in which the justices – by a vote of 6-3 – substantially narrowed the reach of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars racial discrimination in voting.
Jackson dissented from the court’s orders in both cases. She indicated that she would have left the lower court’s ruling in the Mississippi case in place, and reversed the decision in the Native Americans’ case, based on the Supreme Court’s 1996 decision in Morse v. Republican Party of Virginia. In that case, to support its conclusion that private plaintiffs could bring a claim under Section 10 of the VRA, which prohibits poll taxes and gives the attorney general the power to bring lawsuits to implement the ban, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “[a]lthough § 2 … provides no right to sue on its face, ‘the existence of the private right of action under Section 2 … has been clearly intended by Congress since 1965.’” In her dissents, Jackson wrote that the cases “present[] only the question of Section 2’s private enforceability, which our decision in Louisiana v. Callais … did not address.”
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The court asked the Trump administration for its views on The GEO Group v. Nwauzor, a case brought by immigration detainees and the state of Washington, who argue that a private prison contractor violated the state’s minimum-wage law by paying detainees only $1 per day for their work at an ICE facility there. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit allowed the lawsuit to go forward. The GEO Group then came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to decide whether, under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, Washington can reclassify the detainees as employees who are subject to the minimum-wage law. There is no deadline for the solicitor general to file his brief.
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The court also turned down cases filed by drug companies challenging the Drug Price Negotiation Program, a 2022 program that instructs the HHS secretary to negotiate prices with drug manufacturers. The companies argued (among other things) that the law violates the nondelegation doctrine, which generally bars Congress from outsourcing its legislative powers to other branches of government, and the Constitution’s guarantee of due process. The lower courts rejected those arguments; the drug companies then appealed to the Supreme Court, which denied their petitions without comment on Monday.
The Supreme Court denied review in several other high-profile cases, including a lawsuit seeking to hold X, formerly known as Twitter, responsible for its role in allowing child pornography to remain on its platform and a challenge to a California law that a religious preschool says requires it to promote other religions.
The justices will meet for another private conference on Thursday, May 21. Orders from that conference are expected on Tuesday, May 26, at 9:30 a.m. EDT.
