Supreme Court adds citizenship voting dispute to fresh docket

The Supreme Court added six new cases to its 2026-27 argument docket, including a challenge to Arizona’s requirement that voters provide proof of citizenship. The justices also declined to take up President Donald Trump’s appeal of a $5 million award to E. Jea

On Monday morning, the Supreme Court’s decisions landed like a stack of papers you can’t ignore: six new cases added for the 2026-27 term, and one major request refused—President Donald Trump’s bid to revisit a $5 million verdict in the lawsuit brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll.

The announcements came out of the justices’ list of orders from their private conference on Thursday. June 25. the final regularly scheduled conference before the summer recess. The justices met again on Monday and were expected to release orders from that conference sometime this week. possibly as soon as Tuesday.

Carroll’s case had already reached a jury. In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll and awarded her $5 million. Carroll—whose long-running advice column appeared for 27 years with Elle—filed her lawsuit in 2022. She alleged that Trump sexually abused her in a dressing room at a New York department store in 1996 and that he defamed her in a 2022 social media post calling her accusations. among other things. a “complete con job” and a “Hoax.”.

The legal path Carroll used rested on a New York state law enacted that year. It gave adult victims of sexual abuse one year to sue their abusers, even if it would have otherwise been too late.

Trump appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which upheld the verdict and later declined to reconsider the case. Then Trump came to the Supreme Court in November 2025. asking the justices to take up the dispute over evidence and arguing that the outcome should have turned on what the lower courts allowed into the record.

Trump emphasized that he had “clearly and consistently denied that this supposed incident ever occurred.” He contended that the lower courts should not have allowed Carroll’s lawyers to introduce three pieces of evidence: testimony by two women. Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff. who alleged in 2016 that Trump assaulted them—on an airplane in 1979 and at Trump’s home in Florida in 2005—and the “Access Hollywood” tape. a 2005 recording that surfaced shortly before the 2016 election. in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.

Carroll countered that the 2nd Circuit had held. and Trump does not contest. that even if the district court had been wrong to admit the three pieces of evidence. it ultimately wouldn’t have made a difference “taking the record as a whole and considering the strength of Ms. Carroll’s case.” She argued the Supreme Court should deny review.

Trump’s petition for review was initially slated for consideration at the justices’ private conference in late February, but the court did not actually consider it until last week, when it denied it without comment.

What the court did decide, alongside that refusal, was to grant six petitions for review—spanning questions from trademarks to election rules to family law and immigration.

One case, RiseandShine Corp. v. PepsiCo, asks whether a trademark’s “inherent strength” is a question of law, which a judge decides, or instead a question of fact, which is normally decided by a jury.

Hoffmann v. WBI Energy Transmission focuses on how to determine “just compensation” when a private entity uses the federal power of eminent domain to obtain rights of way to construct natural gas pipelines.

International Partners for Ethical Care v. Ferguson centers on whether parents have a right to challenge Washington laws allowing runaway teens to receive mental health care and treatment—including as to gender transitions of their children—at licensed shelters without parental consent.

Wassily v. Blanche deals with noncitizens who receive asylum but whose asylum is later terminated. The case asks whether they can become lawful permanent residents or are instead always ineligible.

Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota zeroes in on election administration. It challenges Arizona’s requirement of proof of citizenship for applicants using the state’s voter-registration form. It also asks whether a federal law. the National Voter Registration Act. allows states to remove noncitizens from its voting rolls within 90 days of a federal election.

Montoya Palacios v. Liggins asks whether a petition for habeas corpus that challenges civil immigration detention counts as a “civil action” under the Equal Access to Justice Act. so that a detainee who prevails could be eligible for attorney’s fees if the government’s position was not “substantially justified.”.

In addition to those six grants, the court called for the views of the U.S. solicitor general in a pair of related cases: Republican National Committee v. Eakin and Pennsylvania v. Eakin. Both concern a Pennsylvania law that requires mail-in voters to write the date on their ballot by hand. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit struck down the law. There is no deadline for the federal government to file its brief.

But not every dispute got a yes. Over written dissents, the court also denied review in several noteworthy cases.

In Dershowitz v. Cable News Network. the justices declined to hear a petition filed by Alan Dershowitz. a Harvard law professor who represented Trump during his first impeachment trial before the Senate in January 2020. Dershowitz went to federal court in Florida. arguing that CNN defamed him by deliberately misrepresenting statements that he made during the proceeding.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision not to take up Dershowitz’s case. His opinion was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. Thomas would have granted review and reconsidered the court’s landmark 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan. That decision held that to prevail on a defamation claim. public figures must show the statement at the center of the claim was both false and made with “actual malice”—meaning either knowing that it was false or with reckless disregard for whether it was false. Thomas argued that standard “‘bears “no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution.”’”.

In Smith v. Kind, the Supreme Court rejected a request from an inmate who was sprayed with pepper spray. The correctional officer who sprayed him knew the officer had a “medical contraindication” to the spray. and the inmate was placed naked in a cold cell for 23 hours to review a federal appeals court’s determination that the correctional officers were entitled to qualified immunity.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit “conclude[d] that a jury could find that both actions … lacked a legitimate penological purpose and thus violated the Eighth Amendment. ” which bans cruel and unusual punishment. But it said the inmate. Antonio Smith. could not point to cases involving the same facts. so the officers’ conduct could not have been “clearly established” as a rights violation.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor called the 7th Circuit’s “grant of qualified immunity … clearly wrong” and said she would reverse that ruling without additional briefing or oral argument.

She wrote that the Supreme Court has emphasized that “clearly established law” should not be defined “at a high level of generality. ” and courts should look to prior cases involving ‘similar circumstances.’ She said that approach does not permit discarding every case that presents any factual variation. “A ‘body of relevant case law’ may clearly establish those contours even if no single case. on its own. presents identical facts.” In this case. Sotomayor stressed that even without a case matching the exact conditions Smith faced. “the body of case law on needless deprivations of warmth in prisons made it abundantly clear. and beyond debate. that the officers’ treatment of Smith violated the Eighth Amendment.”.

And in Doe v. Hochul, the court turned down a petition for review from New York healthcare workers who were denied a religious accommodation from the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. They lost their jobs when they were not vaccinated.

Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas joined Gorsuch’s dissent. Gorsuch argued the case “raises an important and recurring question of federal law that warrants this Court’s attention.” He said. “I fail to see. ” how a state law—especially an unconstitutional one—prohibiting an accommodation can always and automatically supply an employer with a defense that accommodating the employee’s religious observance or practice would place an “undue hardship” on the employer’s business.

For now. the justices’ docket is shaped not only by what they are willing to hear—but by what they refuse. Monday’s decisions kept Trump’s $5 million dispute with Carroll out of the court’s hands. while pushing forward cases that could influence how the law governs everything from voting eligibility to evidence and workplace rights.

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