The Supreme Court on Monday morning added four new cases to its docket for the 2025-26 term, on issues ranging from whether a political candidate can bring a lawsuit challenging Illinois’s procedures for counting votes to the extent of police officers’ ability to enter one’s home under the Fourth Amendment. The justices also denied review in several cases that they had repeatedly considered at their private conferences for the past several months, including two challenges to gun-control measures in Rhode Island and Maryland. (Those denials are covered in a separate story.) The announcement came as part of a list of orders released from the court’s private conference last week.
The justices agreed to take up a case arising from a challenge to a voting scheme in Illinois, Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, which allows election officials to count mail-in ballots received up to two weeks after Election Day as long as the ballots are postmarked by that date.
The lawsuit was filed by Michael Bost, a member of Congress, as well as two presidential electors, who argued that the state laws governing the counting of mail-in ballots violate federal law by extending Election Day beyond the date specified by Congress; the laws also violate the Constitution, they said, by diluting their own votes with “untimely” ballots and impairing their right to run for office.
The lower courts dismissed their case, concluding that the plaintiffs lacked a legal right to sue, known as standing.
Bost and the electors then came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to take up their appeal. “Federal court rulings on the merits,” they wrote, “regardless of outcome, promote public confidence that federal elections are being conducted fairly, with integrity, and in accordance with the law.”
The state urged the justices to deny review, telling them that Bost’s request “boils down to an assertion that the Seventh Circuit misapplied the law of Article III standing. But the Court does not grant review to correct factbound errors,” it emphasized – “and in any event,” the lower court’s decision was correct.
In a brief unsigned order, however, the justices on Monday granted Bost’s petition for review. His case, along with the others granted on Monday, will likely be argued in the fall, with a decision to follow sometime next year.
The justices also granted a petition for review filed by William Trevor Case in Case v. Montana, who was charged with felony assault on a police officer after a 2021 incident in which Case’s former girlfriend called the police to report that Case had threatened both suicide and to harm any police officers who came to his home.
Approximately 40 to 45 minutes after they arrived at his house, police officers entered Case’s home without a warrant. A police officer who encountered Case in an upstairs bedroom believed that he saw a “dark object” near Case’s waist and fired at him, hitting him in the left arm and lower left abdomen.
Case sought to suppress evidence from his home, arguing that the police officers had entered without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment. But the trial court rejected his motion and he was convicted.
The Montana Supreme Court upheld the denial of Case’s motion to suppress. It relied on a theory known as the “community caretaker” doctrine, which allows police officers to enter without a warrant when they believe that citizens may be in danger or need police assistance. Here, the state supreme court concluded, police officers had “objective, specific, and articulable facts” indicating that Case needed help because he was “suicidal and potentially intoxicated.”
Case came to the Supreme Court in December, asking the justices to weigh in on whether police need probable cause that there is an emergency or whether it is instead enough, as in this case, that police have a reasonable belief that someone inside the home needs immediate help.
In The GEO Group v. Menocal, the justices agreed to decide whether a government contractor’s claim that it is entitled to sovereign immunity for work that it did on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement falls within what is known as the collateral order doctrine. Normally, courts of appeals can only hear appeals from final decisions by district courts. But under the collateral order doctrine, courts of appeals also have the power to rule on appeals from a narrow category of orders that do not end the litigation – for example, orders denying claims of qualified or absolute immunity.
This case comes to the court in a class action brought by a former detainee at a private immigration detention facility in Colorado that was operated by The GEO Group. The detainees allege that they were required to clean common areas in their housing unit, as well as the recreation yard, and faced punishment – including stints in solitary confinement – if they refused. They also participated in a voluntary work program, for which they received one dollar per day. The plaintiffs alleged that the cleaning requirement violated the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act and that GEO had unjustly enriched itself through the low salaries of the voluntary work program.
GEO countered, among other things, that as a government contractor it could not be sued. After a federal district court rejected that claim, GEO appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which dismissed the appeal.
The court of appeals emphasized that one of the criteria for determining whether a non-final order falls within the collateral order doctrine is whether the appeal would “resolve an important issue completely separate from the merits of the action.” But to determine whether a government contractor is entitled to sovereign immunity, it explained, it would have to consider whether ICE directed or required GEO’s actions, which would “presumably overlap” with the question at the center of the case – that is, whether GEO’s actions were legal in the first place.
GEO came to the Supreme Court in January, asking the justices to weigh in. It told the justices that in the courts of appeals like the 10th Circuit, where orders denying government contractors’ claims of immunity cannot be appealed immediately, a government contractor must instead “endure the expense and distraction of litigation—and potential financial liabilities for continuing to perform its government contracts—before an appellate court will consider whether the suit was permitted in the first place.” Such a prospect, GEO added, “is inconsistent with the very concept of immunity.”
The plaintiffs urged the court to deny review. They pushed back against GEO’s suggestion that leaving the 10th Circuit’s decision in place could deter companies from entering into government contracts, contending that “it’s hard to imagine that any company would base its contracting decisions on whether” it could immediately appeal the denial of its immunity claim. And that is all that is at stake in this case, they stressed.
The justices will also hear in the fall a case, Hencely v. Fluor Corporation, brought by Winston Hencely, who was serving in the U.S. Army when he was wounded in a 2016 suicide bombing at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan. Hencely sued Fluor Corporation, the government contractor that had employed the bomber, contending both that Fluor’s supervision and retention of the bomber were negligent under South Carolina law (where he had brought his lawsuit) and that the company had breached its contract with the federal government.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit threw out Hencely’s claims, holding that they were trumped by an exception to the Federal Tort Claims Act, which prohibits lawsuits against the government for “[a]ny claim arising out of the combatant activities of the military or naval forces” during wartime.
Hencely came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to take up his case, which they agreed to do on Monday.
Over a dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court rejected an appeal by Chanel Nicholson in Nicholson v. W.L. York, who in 2021 filed a class action lawsuit against three adult entertainment clubs where she had performed as a dancer. Nicholson, who is African American, relied on a federal civil rights law that bars racial discrimination in contracts. She contended that she had been barred from working at the clubs after she refused to comply with the tip-sharing policy at one and that she was turned away from two others because there were supposedly “too many Black girls” already dancing there.
A federal district court dismissed one of the clubs from the lawsuit and then ruled in favor of two others, concluding that Nicholson had filed her lawsuit too late.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld that decision. It rejected Nicholson’s argument that although the clubs’ first discriminatory acts took place in 2014 and 2017, which were outside the four-year statute of limitations, that statute of limitations began to run again in 2021, when the clubs once again refused to allow her to enter the club because of her race. The 2021 discriminatory acts that are at the center of her claims against the clubs, the court of appeals explained, were “merely a continuation of” the clubs’ earlier discriminatory acts in 2014 and 2017. Therefore, the court of appeals reasoned, the statute of limitations could be extended only if Nicholson’s claims fell under a doctrine known as the “continuing violations” doctrine – an exception to the statute of limitations when the acts that would not otherwise be timely are part of a larger series of events. But that doctrine, the court of appeals said, only applies to claims alleging a hostile work environment, which Nicholson has not brought.
Nicholson – originally representing herself – came to the Supreme Court last year, asking the justices to take up her case. After considering her petition for review at five consecutive conferences, the court on Monday denied her petition for review.
In Jackson’s view, the ruling by the 5th Circuit was “patently erroneous.” Under the Supreme Court’s “clear precedents,” she contended, “’each discrete discriminatory act starts a new clock for filing charges alleging that act,’ regardless of whether similar instances of discrimination have occurred in the past.” Therefore, she wrote, the Supreme Court “should have granted Nicholson’s petition and summarily reversed” the lower court’s decision against her.
The justices will meet for another private conference on June 5. Orders from that conference will be issued on June 9 at 9:30 a.m.
Posted in Cases in the Pipeline, Featured
