Opinions for Tuesday, March 31

The government’s top Supreme Court lawyer will likely face vigorous questioning from the justices on Wednesday in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright-citizenship case.

What follows are 20 sets of questions that we ourselves would love to ask Solicitor General D. John Sauer in some great moot court in the sky. (Here on planet Earth, Sauer has of course not invited us to moot him, though he did expressly respond to Akhil’s amicus brief at page 13 of his reply brief.) In a sequel column, we’ll list some of the hardest questions that might be posed to the appellate advocate on our side of the case, the ACLU’s Cecilia Wang, along with the best answers we think she can give.

In Dissent is a recurring series by Anastasia Boden on Supreme Court dissents that have shaped (or reshaped) our country.

By the time George Jarkesy reached a real court, nearly a decade had passed since he had first been pulled into an administrative tribunal – and that quasi-court had already found him guilty.

The Supreme Court on Friday morning announced that it will hear arguments on April 29 – the last day of the court’s April argument session, and the last day of regularly scheduled oral arguments – on the Trump administration’s efforts to end the Temporary Protected Status program for several thousand Syrians and roughly 350,000 Haitians currently living in the United States.

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Tuesday in Pitchford v. Cain, the case of a Mississippi man who contends that he was sentenced to death in violation of the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination in jury selection. Terry Pitchford asserts that such a constitutional violation “undermines the foundational promise of equal justice under law.” But Mississippi counters that this is not one of the “narrow circumstances” in which federal courts can grant state prisoners post-conviction relief.

On April 1, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in one of the highest-profile cases of the 2025-26 term – and indeed, one of the biggest cases in several years. Trump v. Barbara is a challenge to President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. All of the lower courts that have weighed in so far have ruled that the order is unconstitutional, but the Trump administration contends that those rulings – as well as the longstanding view that virtually everyone born in the United States is entitled to U.S. citizenship – are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution. The challengers counter that the Trump administration “is asking for nothing less than a remaking of our Nation’s constitutional foundations” – one that “would cast a shadow over the citizenship of millions upon millions of Americans, going back generations.”