SCOTUS NEWS
on Mar 10, 2025
at 11:10 am
The court took up two cases in a regularly scheduled list of orders on Monday. (Katie Barlow)
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to weigh in on the constitutionality of Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” – that is, the effort to “convert” someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. That announcement came as part of a list of orders released on Monday morning from the justices’ private conference last week.
Less than a year and a half ago, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a Washington state law that prohibits licensed therapists from practicing conversion therapy on children. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from the decision not to weigh in then, indicating that they would have granted review. On Monday, the justices agreed to take up a challenge to a similar ban, this time from Colorado.
The case was filed by Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor and a practicing Christian. She sometimes works with clients who want to discuss issues such that, she says, “implicate Christian values about human sexuality and the treatment of their own body.” And although Chiles “never promises that she can solve” issues relating to gender identity, gender roles, and sexual attraction, “she believes clients can accept the bodies that God has given them and find peace.” She contends that the law violates her First Amendment rights to free speech and to freely exercise her religion.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit rebuffed Chiles’s challenge. It reasoned that Colorado enacted the law, based on evidence of the harms of conversion therapy, as part of its effort to regulate the health care profession and that the law primarily regulates therapists’ conduct, rather than their speech.
Chiles came to the Supreme Court in November, asking the justices to hear her case. She contended that governments like Colorado “do not have a freer hand to regulate speech simply because the speaker is ‘licensed’ or giving ‘specialized advice.’” And she warned that the 10th Circuit’s rule “has devastating real-world consequences. In jurisdictions with counseling restrictions,” she wrote, “many young people cannot receive the care they seek — and critically need.”
The state countered that the ban on conversion therapy was based on “overwhelming evidence that efforts to change a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity are unsafe and ineffective.” And it distinguished Chiles’s counseling of her patients from “a chat with one’s college roommate,” emphasizing that the two scenarios receive different protections under the First Amendment. “Unlike laypersons,” it told the justices, “those who choose to practice as health professionals are required, among various other responsibilities, to provide treatment to their patients consistent with their field’s standard of care.”
In a brief order on Monday, the justices granted Chiles’s petition for review. The case will likely be argued sometime in the fall, with a decision to follow by summer 2026.
In a second case granted on Monday, the justices agreed to decide whether state procedural rules apply to lawsuits filed in federal court.
The question comes to the court in a medical-malpractice lawsuit filed in federal court in Delaware. The court dismissed Harold Berk’s case, citing his failure to comply with a state law that requires plaintiffs in medical-malpractice cases to include an “affidavit of merit” — certification from an expert witness attesting that the plaintiff’s medical malpractice claims are plausible – in their filings.
A federal appeals court upheld the dismissal, explaining that the state law does not conflict with the rules governing procedures in federal court.
Berk came to the Supreme Court in October, asking the justices to weigh in. Other federal courts of appeals would allow his lawsuit to move forward without the affidavit of merit, he contended, on the theory that the state requirement is inconsistent with the federal rules that outline what plaintiffs must provide when bringing a lawsuit – and do not impose such an additional obligation.
One purpose of those federal rules, Berks stressed, is to “bring about uniformity in the federal courts by getting away from local rules.” “That purpose,” he told the justices, “is undermined when federal courts allow a patchwork of state procedural rules to govern, creating a chaotic landscape where litigants face dramatically different procedural standards based solely on where they file.”
The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a bid by 19 Republican-led states to file a case directly in the Supreme Court to block lawsuits brought by five other states against oil and gas companies, alleging that the companies knew that their products contributed to climate change but instead misled the public about the cause of climate change and the risks of fossil fuels.
Thomas dissented from the decision not to allow the case to move forward in the Supreme Court, in a three-page opinion joined by Alito.
The Republican-led states came to the Supreme Court last spring, seeking permission to file their lawsuit in the Supreme Court. The states sought to rely on the court’s original jurisdiction – that is, its limited power under the Constitution to hear a dispute for the first time, rather than as an appeal from state or lower federal courts.
In October, the justices asked the federal government for its views on whether the dispute should move forward in the Supreme Court. In a brief filed in December, Elizabeth Prelogar – the U.S. solicitor general during the Biden administration – urged the court to turn down the Republican-led states’ bid and allow the disputes to play out in the state courts instead.
Prelogar contended (among other things) that the states did not have a legal right to sue, known as standing, to bring their case. Noting that the state-court lawsuits that the Republican-led states seek to halt “are still in their early stages,” she argued that any connection between the state-court suits and an injury to the Republican-led states or their citizens is too speculative to support a lawsuit. “The most that can be said,” she reasoned, “is that a state court ‘might’ find the private companies liable” in state court. “But even then,” she wrote, “those directly affected would be the private companies, not the” Republican-led states or their citizens.
Thomas reiterated his skepticism that the Supreme Court can decline to take up lawsuits pitting states against each other. “This discretionary approach,” he wrote, “is a modern invention that the Court has never persuasively justified.” And the approach is particularly “troubling,” he continued, because it “leaves the 19 plaintiff States without any legal means of vindicating their claims against the 5 defendant States.”
The Supreme Court also turned down an invitation to overrule the half-century-old framework, first outlined in McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, used when plaintiffs do not have direct evidence to show that they were the victims of employment discrimination.
Thomas once again dissented from the decision not to intervene, this time in a nine-page opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
The question comes to the court in the case of a California fire chief who claims he was fired because of his religion – specifically, for attending a Christian leadership event. The city counters that he was let go after “years” of “mismanagement, misconduct, and refusals to follow” orders given by city managers.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed with a federal trial court that Ronald Hittle had not presented enough evidence to support his religious discrimination claim. The city, it concluded, had legitimate and nondiscriminatory reasons for firing Hittle. Over a dissent by four judges, the full court of appeals declined to rehear the case.
Hittle came to the Supreme Court in October, asking the justices to take up his case. He called the McDonnell Douglas test “unworkable and egregiously wrong,” arguing that it is inconsistent with the test of federal employment discrimination laws and the federal rules governing civil lawsuits. At the very least, he contended, the court should clarify what a plaintiff needs to show at the third step of the McDonnell Douglas framework to demonstrate that the nondiscriminatory reason that an employer offers to justify its actions is actually just an excuse.
Arguing that the Supreme Court “appears to have” created the McDonnell Douglas test “out of whole cloth,” Thomas (joined by Gorsuch) would have granted Hittle’s petition for review and used his case as an “opportunity to revisit McDonnell Douglas and decide” whether the test “remains a workable and useful evidentiary tool.” Hittle’s case would have been an appropriate one in which to consider that question, Thomas explained, because Hittle had “presented ‘ample’ evidence of discriminatory intent on the part of those who decided to terminate him.” Therefore, Thomas concluded, the lower courts should not have ruled for the city.
The justices once again did not act on several other high-profile petitions for review that they considered last week, including a pair of cases contesting Maryland’s ban on assault-style weapons and Rhode Island’s bar on large-capacity magazines, as well as the case of a Massachusetts middle schooler who was barred from wearing a t-shirt to school reading “There Are Only Two Genders.”
The justices will meet again on Friday, March 21, to consider new petitions for review. Orders from that conference are expected on Monday, March 24.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.
