Updated on March 13 at 4:40 p.m.

Welcome to our SCOTUS Innovators series, a new recurring column on people who have shaped our understanding of the Supreme Court.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to chat with Jerry Goldman (a fellow Northwestern alum), founder of the Oyez project. For those unfamiliar with Oyez, this website was the first to digitize and share thousands of hours of Supreme Court oral arguments and opinion announcements, making it far easier for legal scholars and the public to engage with the court.

During a roundtable at the White House on Friday, March 6, President Donald Trump returned to what has become a familiar refrain in the weeks since the Supreme Court struck down his signature tariffs: He railed against the justices for interfering with his policy plans, accusing the court of harming the country. “I think the Supreme Court ought to be ashamed of itself for a lot of reasons, ok?,” the president said. “They have hurt this country so badly because they haven’t had the guts to do what’s right.”

The Trump administration on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to pause a ruling by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that barred the government from ending a program that allows Haitians to remain in the United States temporarily. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer also asked the justices to take up the merits of the case, as well as a similar one already before them involving Syria, without waiting for a federal appeals court to weigh in. “The issues that” the government’s application “presents are … common among the numerous challenges to” efforts to terminate the program for a variety of countries, “have been ventilated in litigation across the country, and cry out for immediate resolution,” Sauer wrote.

Critics and supporters of President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship often focus on the order’s barring of automatic citizenship to children born to individuals unlawfully present in the United States. In this column, I would instead like to focus on the order’s barring of such citizenship to children born to individuals lawfully but transiently present in the United States, because the order’s treatment of those children brings the dispute into sharp focus. One side argues that the 14th Amendment effectively codifies the English common law of subjectship to declare that the children of foreign visitors are birthright citizens. The other side argues that the 14th Amendment instead codifies an American rule of declaring as citizens those who have chosen to make this country their home. The latter view is the better one.

Free speech on university campuses is a perennially hot topic, perhaps most recently reflected in protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at places like Ball State University, Harvard, and Columbia. This debate has also arisen in the context of offensive speech, harassment (under Titles VI and IX), bias response teams, and speaker policies. In response to each event, the public, commentators, and scholars have questioned the appropriate boundaries of speech in the college environment, and, what, if any, constitutional protections exist.

So how does the First Amendment apply to students in the context of public universities? The question seems clear, but the answer is surprisingly murky. Although the court has carved out a First Amendment framework for K-12 schools, it has not done so for universities, and the lower federal courts are in stark disagreement on this issue. This SCOTUS explainer takes a deep dive into what, exactly, is going on here, and how this might affect current (and future) events.