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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is beginning its new term, welcoming the public back to the courtroom and hearing arguments for the first time since issuing a landmark ruling stripping away women’s constitutional protections for abortion.
Monday’s
session also is the first time new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s
first Black female justice, will participate in arguments. And the public is
back for the first time since the court closed in March 2020 because of the
coronavirus pandemic.
The court’s
overturning of the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade abortion decision is still
reverberating in legal fights over state abortion bans and other restrictions.
But a new stack of high-profile cases awaits the justices. Several cases the
court has agreed to hear involve race or elections or both, and the court has
also agreed to hear a dispute that returns the issue of free speech and LGBTQ
rights to the court.
Also hanging
over the justices is some unfinished business from last term: the leak of a
draft of the abortion decision seven weeks before it was formally announced.
Chief Justice John Roberts ordered an investigation, but the court has yet to
provide an update.
Jackson, for
her part, has been waiting for months to fully begin her new role since being
confirmed in April. She was sworn in when Justice Stephen Breyer retired in
June, at the end of a term where the court dominated 6-3 by conservatives also
expanded gun rights, reined in the government’s ability to fight climate change
and blocked a Biden administration effort to get workers at large companies
vaccinated against COVID-19. Breyer, a liberal, was on the losing side of those
cases, and Jackson is also expected to be in dissent in many of the court’s
most prominent cases.
Since she
was sworn in, however, the court has largely been on a summer break. The
justices met privately last week to consider a long list of appeals that piled
up over the summer. On Friday, the justices took the bench for a brief ceremony
in which Roberts wished Jackson a “long and happy career in our common
calling,” the traditional welcome for a new justice.
But Jackson
also joins the court at a time of declining public support for the court. Polls
following the court’s abortion decision have shown a sharp drop in the court’s
approval rating and in people’s confidence in the court as an institution. A
poll over the summer found 43% of Americans saying they have hardly any
confidence in the court, up from 27% earlier in the year.
On Monday,
the court is considering an important water rights case that could limit
federal regulation under the nation’s main water pollution law, the Clean Water
Act.
Other
significant cases include a controversial Republican-led appeal that could
dramatically change the way elections for Congress and the presidency are
conducted by handing more power to state legislatures. There’s also the case of
a Colorado website designer who says her religious beliefs prevent her working
with same-sex couples on their weddings. Next month, the justices will hear a
challenge to the consideration of race in college admissions.
Follow AP’s
coverage of the Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court