She has argued that it would violate her right to religious freedom to be forced to design wedding websites for same-sex marriages.
Going into 2023, the Supreme Court will once again broach the question of religious freedom in the case of a Colorado website designer seeking an exemption from the state’s anti-discrimination laws. The same 6-3 majority in Carson v Makin decided that if the state of Maine offered vouchers to families to send their children to private schools, it could not refuse to provide the same funding for religious schools.Īnd in a Boston case, the court was unanimous in deciding that the city should allow a Christian flag to fly over city hall because it allows other groups to raise their own flags. The court ruled his speech a private expression of devotion. In Kennedy v Bremerton School District, the conservative majority sided with a football coach at a public high school who had been suspended for praying on the football field after games. Bloomberg’s Noah Feldman went so far as to call the principle “dead”.
#SCOTUS DECISION TODAY SERIES#
In a series of rulings this year, the court broadened the legal interpretation of religious freedom and bucked the longstanding norm of separating church and state.Īt issue is the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which states that the government can neither prohibit the free exercise of religion nor promote the “establishment” of any religion.Ĭritics of the court’s decisions on religion in 2022 question whether that “establishment” clause will continue to serve as a wall between government and religion. Former high school football coach Joe Kennedy became the subject of a Supreme Court case over his practice of praying on field after matches Expanding religious freedom In response, the US Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, offering federal protections for same-sex marriage in a remarkable show of bipartisan support for LGBTQ rights. In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents”, including the decision to legalise same-sex marriage. The Dobbs decision has had impacts beyond abortion too. Many of those bans now face legal appeals, and some states, like Michigan and Kansas, voted to affirm abortion rights. Other states still had pre-Roe abortion bans written into their laws. Thirteen had “trigger” laws, which automatically enacted abortion bans once Roe was repealed. The Dobbs decision, released in June, put abortion rights in the hands of states. The leak itself was history-making: Justices on the right and left decried it as a breach of tradition, and an investigation is ongoing. Here are five issues the court tackled in 2022 – and why they matter for 2023 and beyond.Ībortion rights advocates have braced for a decision in the years since, and in May, a draft opinion leaked, showing that the Supreme Court’s majority planned to overturn Roe. According to data released in June 2022, the court tilted conservative more than 73 percent of the time in cases that were not otherwise unanimous, a rate only surpassed in 1931.īut with Democrats currently holding a majority in the Senate, US President Joe Biden was able to fulfill his campaign promise to appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court: Ketanji Brown Jackson.Īll four of the recent appointees are under age 60, and with Supreme Court justices enjoying lifetime appointments, they are likely to shape rulings for decades to come. The result has been a slate of decisions that leaned decidedly right.
The past five years had brought four new members onto the nine-person bench, including three appointed by former President Donald Trump, a Republican.
#SCOTUS DECISION TODAY FULL#
The court began 2022 in the middle of its first full term with its new 6-3 conservative majority. Those shifts in the nation’s highest court have translated into critical decisions in the past year, changing the landscape in the US on issues such as gun rights, abortion and religious freedom. Never has the court been so diverse and not in 90 years has it been so conservative. The year 2022 was, in some ways, the fulfillment of two distinct visions for the United States Supreme Court.
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