Supreme Court Term 2025-2026

A statewide coalition of nonpartisan community organizations sued state and county officials, asserting that the practice of disenfranchising voters for failure to handwrite the date on the outer return envelope of their mail ballot packet, despite the lack of any purpose or use for the handwritten date, violates the fundamental right to vote guaranteed by the Pennsylvania Constitution’s Free and Equal Elections Clause.

Silver State Hope Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU of Nevada prevailed in their challenge to Nevada’s ban on Medicaid coverage for abortion as sex-based discrimination in violation of the state constitution’s Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Filed in September 2024, the court’s written order — which is not subject to additional challenge — concludes the case and requires the state’s Medicaid program to cover abortion care. Following this ruling, the state will begin to take steps to extend coverage to abortion. The case was the first legal challenge under the ERA, which Nevada voters overwhelmingly approved in 2022. Nevada joins 18 other states that cover abortion under their state Medicaid program.

Whether a U.S. citizen gets a day in court to challenge the federal government’s revocation of her spouse’s immigrant visa.

This case concerns the First Step Act of 2018, in which Congress made major reductions to the mandatory minimum sentences for certain federal drug and firearm offenses. These changes result in sentences many decades shorter than were required under the previous laws. The question in this case was whether people who were initially sentenced prior to enactment of the First Step Act, but whose sentences were vacated and remanded for resentencing after enactment of the law, can benefit from its major reductions in applicable mandatory minimums. For defendants like Mr. Carpenter, who was originally sentenced to a draconian 116 years in prison as a result of the pre-First Step Act mandatory minimums, applying the First Step Act can mean the difference between dying in prison and having the opportunity to eventually go free. Unfortunately, although there is a split among federal courts of appeals on this question, the Supreme Court denied cert in this case in February 2024.