SCOTUStoday for Thursday, February 12

Today is Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s birthday. Born in 1965, Kavanaugh has served on the Supreme Court since 2018.

SCOTUS Quick Hits

• On Wednesday, the court announced what cases it will hear during its April argument session, which will take place from April 20-22 and then from April 27-29. For more on the April schedule, see the On Site section below.
• Also on Wednesday, the court denied a request for a stay of execution from Kendrick Simpson, who is scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma today.
• The court could rule at any time on an interim docket case on California’s policies for parental notification if a student chooses to use different names or pronouns.
• The court has not yet indicated when it will next release opinions. If the court follows its typical pattern, the earliest the next opinion day may be is Friday, Feb. 20, when the justices are next scheduled to take the bench.
• The court will next hear arguments on Monday, Feb. 23, the first day of its February sitting.

Morning Reads

• The E.P.A. Is Barreling Toward a Supreme Court Climate Showdown (Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman, The New York Times)(Paywall) — Today, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is expected to move to repeal the “endangerment finding,” a decision from the Obama administration that justifies regulations “requir[ing] the federal government to combat climate change,” according to The New York Times. Legal experts told the Times that the Trump administration has moved rapidly toward the repeal in hopes of ensuring that the resulting legal battle will make it to the Supreme Court while President Donald Trump is still in office. They likely want to “‘defend their own work’ in court and avoid the risk that a future administration might decide not to defend the case,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor at William & Mary Law School. But Adler added that moving quickly toward the repeal may weaken the administration’s case. “You want to move quickly, but for purposes of administrative review, agencies need to dot their i’s and cross their t’s, and that can take time,” he said.
• Tariff revenue soars more than 300% as U.S. awaits Supreme Court decision (Jeff Cox, CNBC) — New Treasury Department data shows that President Donald Trump’s signature tariffs have “helped put a dent in the pace of the budget deficit,” providing “a reminder of how pivotal a long-awaited Supreme Court decision could be to federal fiscal health,” according to CNBC. “Customs duties collected through tariffs totaled $30 billion for [January], putting the fiscal year-to-date tally at $124 billion, or 304% more than the same period in 2025.”
• Judges may have found a way to bypass 5th Circuit ruling upholding Trump’s mass detention policy (Kyle Cheney, Politico) — After a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Friday upheld the Trump administration’s mass detention policy, “[f]ederal judges may have found a workaround” allowing them to continue siding against the government in related cases, according to Politico. “[T]wo federal district court judges in Texas, who are bound by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit’s ruling, said the 2-1 decision left an opening for them to continue granting immigrants’ release on other grounds, primarily constitutional arguments against detaining people who have established roots in the U.S. without due process.” Still, the 5th Circuit’s Friday ruling is expected to be appealed, either to the full 5th Circuit or the Supreme Court, Politico reported.
• 11th Circuit tackles sex offender residency ban amid child predator death penalty push (Gabriel Tynes, Courthouse News Service) — On Tuesday, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit heard argument on “Alabama’s residency restriction barring certain sex offenders from living with minors, including their own children,” which has been challenged on 14th Amendment grounds, according to Courthouse News Service. The article noted that the court’s debate may foreshadow expected future arguments on Alabama’s effort to make “certain non-homicide sexual crimes against children under 12 punishable by death.” The state’s bill broadening the scope of the death penalty “mirrors laws in Florida, Tennessee and elsewhere designed to challenge the Supreme Court’s 2008 Kennedy v. Louisiana ruling that such punishments are unconstitutionally cruel and unusual.”
• The Pronoun Wars in Public Schools (Wall Street Journal Editorial Board)(Paywall) — Disputes over public schools’ policies for student pronouns are cropping up across the country, and the Supreme Court may soon need to weigh in, according to The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. The piece highlighted a recent decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which held that a public-school district can refuse to hire a teacher who won’t use transgender pronouns because “classroom pronoun usage isn’t speech as a private citizen, but part of a teacher’s official duties.”

A Closer Look: Adams v. Sacramento County

The Supreme Court has an opportunity to revisit the free speech rights of public employees in a case that centers on text messages exchanged more than 10 years ago. The petition for review in Adams v. Sacramento County asks how courts should analyze conversations about subjects such as racism in determining whether an employee’s speech addressed a matter of public concern.

The text messages at issue in the case were sent on New Year’s Eve in 2013 by Kate Adams to one of her friends and colleagues in the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department. Adams described being sent racist images and then forwarded two of the images to her friend.

Those images resurfaced more than seven years later, after Adams had become the Chief of Police for the City of Rancho Cordova, California. A department employee submitted screenshots of the images – but not Adams’ surrounding commentary criticizing the images – to the county after Adams reported the employee for misconduct, according to Adams’ petition for review. Soon thereafter, the department went to Adams with the images and gave her the choice between resigning and being fired. She “resigned under duress,” per her petition, after being warned about a potential “media circus.”

About six months later, someone anonymously sent the NAACP copies of the images, which prompted media scrutiny of Adams. In response, she sued the County of Sacramento, the county sheriff, and several others who were unnamed, alleging, among other things, breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and free speech violations.

The Supreme Court petition addresses only the First Amendment claims, which were dismissed by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. After a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit voted 2-1 to affirm the dismissal, Adams asked the justices to overturn that decision and allow her First Amendment case to proceed.

The lower courts’ decisions rested on previous Supreme Court rulings on the free speech rights of public employees, which outlined under what circumstances a government employee can claim First Amendment protections. First, the employee has to be speaking in a private capacity, not an official one. And when speaking in private, the employee has to be addressing a matter of public concern. The district court and the 9th Circuit both held that Adams’ text messages did not address a matter of public concern, because, as the 9th Circuit put it, “Adams’s texts and distribution of the images speak only of her exasperation at being sent the images, which is an issue of personal … concern,” and thus were not a form of protected speech.

In her petition for review, Adams contends that the 9th Circuit’s decision deepened a split between the federal courts of appeals over whether speech about controversial subjects, including racism, should always be considered speech about an issue of public concern. “Seven circuits hold that speech on controversial subjects like racism is always speech on a matter of public concern because of its subject matter. Five—including now the Ninth—hold that such speech loses all First Amendment protection unless expressed in a way courts later deem sufficiently public-facing or advocacy-oriented,” she wrote.

But in their response to Adams’ petition, county officials assert that it “grossly mischaracterizes” the significance of the 9th Circuit’s decision “in order to manufacture a circuit split that does not exist.” Specifically, they contend that the federal courts of appeals do not part ways over speech about racism. What’s leading to the different rulings, they continued, is the circumstances under which the speech was shared. “The circuits all apply the same test. The mere fact that they sometimes reach different conclusions is not indicative of a circuit split; rather, it demonstrates the highly fact specific inquiry required” when determining whether a public employee has addressed a matter of public concern.

These arguments are notable because evidence of a circuit split is one of the top factors the Supreme Court considers when determining whether to hear a case. Adams v. Sacramento County is scheduled to be considered by the justices for the first time at their private conference on Friday, Feb. 20.

SCOTUS Quote

“The only legitimate inquiry we can make is whether it is constitutional. If it is not, its virtues, if it have any, cannot save it; if it is, its faults cannot be invoked to accomplish its destruction. If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch, as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned.”

— Justice George Sutherland in Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell

On Site

From the SCOTUSblog Team

Supreme Court announces cases it will hear at term’s end

The Supreme Court will close out its 2025-26 term with oral arguments in cases involving immigration law, the Fourth Amendment, generic drug labels, and the availability of claims alleging that a private company aided and abetted torture and serious violations of international human rights laws.

Contributor Corner

Which of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees is the “weakest link”?

In his latest Empirical SCOTUS column, Adam Feldman analyzed the work of President Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees – Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – in an effort to determine how often, and under what circumstances, each of them aligns with the court’s liberal bloc.

The gerrymandering mess

In his latest Courtly Observations column, Erwin Chemerinsky revisited the Supreme Court’s recent rulings allowing Texas and California to use their new congressional maps in the 2026 elections, explaining why he believes that court decisions allowing for “unchecked partisan gerrymandering” undermine democracy.