Summer is quickly approaching, but we here at SCOTUSblog are focused on a different season: opinion season, the time of year when court watchers’ attention shifts from argument days (which, barring unforeseen events, ended on April 29) to opinion days.
The court is expected to release 33 more opinions in argued cases over roughly the next six weeks and to close out the current term by late June or early July. We’re expecting at least one ruling to be released on Thursday, but the court has not yet announced opinion days for next week or the month of June.
Still, we’re not entirely in the dark about what the next six weeks will hold. In each of the past three terms, the court has followed essentially the same pattern during opinion season: weekly opinion announcements on Thursdays – which serve as conference days for the justices this time of year – from mid-May until mid-June, at which point the justices began holding two or even three opinion days per week to get all of the remaining decisions out the door.
If the court continues that pattern this term (as it seems to be doing), opinions will be announced on Thursday, May 21; Thursday, May 28; Thursday, June 4; Thursday, June 11; Thursday, June 18; and Thursday, June 25. Beyond those Thursdays, the prediction game gets tougher. We know that the justices will not release opinions on Friday, June 19, which is the Juneteenth holiday, but the next Friday – June 26 – is a good candidate, because the court scheduled several Friday opinion days in late June over the past three terms. Indeed, Friday, June 27, 2025, was the final opinion day last term.
But even if these guesses turn out to be accurate, plenty of mysteries remain. Most notably, we will not know in advance how many rulings or which rulings are coming on each opinion day, except for the final one. On what will turn out to be the next-to-last opinion day, the chief justice will indicate that when it next takes the bench the court “will announce all remaining opinions ready during this term of the Court.” The court often releases the highest-profile cases on the final day (since these often take longer to write based on the number of concurrences and dissents they generate, particularly if they were argued later in the term), which may mean that we won’t get the birthright citizenship ruling until then.
If you have lingering questions about opinion season, please feel free to send them to [email protected]. We will do our best to answer them in this newsletter, whether in a future Closer Look or the Ask Amy section. And please plan on joining our opinion announcement live blogs, which will begin at 9:30 a.m. EDT on opinion days.
