Supreme Court Term 2025-2026

State legislatures are responsible for creating state legislative and U.S. congressional districts. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal courts have no authority to review claims that states have sorted voters along partisan lines to favor one political party over others. However, challenges to partisan gerrymandering continue in many state courts, and this case involves one such constitutional challenge in Kentucky.

The University of Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine filed a lawsuit on November 16, 2023, challenging the Chancellor of the State University System of Florida’s order to state universities to deactivate the student group. This order threatens the students’ constitutionally-protected right to free speech and association in violation of the First Amendment. The ACLU and its partners are seeking a preliminary injunction that would bar the Chancellor and the University of Florida from deactivating the UF SJP.

Hundreds if not thousands of Salt Lake City, Utah, residents have nowhere safe to stay and must live and sleep in public. This case—brought by a small group of residents and businesses—involves the question whether this citywide homelessness crisis constitutes a nuisance under Utah state law. It also presents the question whether Salt Lake City can be ordered to clear encampments, forcibly relocate people who are unhoused, and enforce vague and overbroad laws criminalizing homelessness where doing so will likely, if not certainly, violate unhoused people’s state and federal constitutional rights. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative and Trone Center for Justice and Equality, along with the ACLU of Utah and the Salt Lake Legal Defenders Association, represent amici curiae in the trial court who oppose the plaintiffs’ nuisance claims and their request for relief.

On March 1, 2023, WRP and the ACLU of Texas sent an advocacy letter to Spring Branch Independent School District (“District”) on behalf of G.H., a Spring Woods High School student athlete. The ACLU’s investigation had revealed that the District maintained a discriminatory, sex-specific dress code and gender-based inequities in the school’s athletics program, and that the student was mistreated after objecting to these policies and practices. The advocacy letter raised concerns that the District’s actions reinforced invidious sex stereotypes, treated girl athletes as lesser than boy athletes, and potentially violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The District’s policies and actions harm all students, regardless of gender, but have particularly egregious consequences for Black girls and other girls of color.