The Opinions of Justice Amy Coney Barrett

Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors

Question Presented: When an APA claim "accrues" for purposes of the six-year statute of limitations—at the time the regulation is issued, or when the plaintiff is first injured by it.

Holding: An APA claim accrues when the plaintiff is first injured, not when the regulation is issued.

Murthy v. Missouri

Question Presented: Whether plaintiffs had standing to challenge federal officials' communications with social-media platforms as unconstitutional coercion.

Holding: Plaintiffs lacked Article III standing; the injunction was reversed.

Department of State v. Munoz

Question Presented: Whether a U.S. citizen has a fundamental liberty interest in her noncitizen spouse's admission to the United States.

Holding: A citizen has no fundamental liberty interest in a spouse's admission; the decision was reversed.

Sheetz v. El Dorado County

Question Presented: Whether legislatively imposed permit-condition fees are exempt from Nollan/Dolan takings scrutiny.

Holding: The Takings Clause does not distinguish between legislative and administrative exactions; the case was vacated and remanded.

Lindke v. Freed

Question Presented: When a public official's social-media activity constitutes state action under §1983.

Holding: A public official engages in state action only if he had actual authority to speak for the state on the matter and purported to exercise that authority in the posts.

Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer

Question Presented: Whether an ADA "tester" has standing to sue a hotel for failing to post accessibility information online.

Holding: The case was moot because the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed her other suits; the judgment was vacated.

Moody v. NetChoice, LLC

Question Presented: Whether Florida's and Texas's social‑media laws restricting content moderation violate the First Amendment.

Holding: The judgments are vacated, and the cases are remanded, because neither the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 11th Circuit nor the 5th Circuit conducted a proper analysis of the facial First Amendment challenges to the Florida and Texas laws regulating large internet platforms.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett concurred but wrote separately to emphasize that as-applied (rather than facial) challenges would better enable courts to home in on whether and how specific functions on internet sites are inherently expressive. She specifically noted that the way internet platforms use automated and AI-dependent systems might have constitutional significance.

Trump v. United States

Question Presented: Whether, and to what extent, a former President has criminal immunity for acts taken while in office.

Holding: The nature of presidential power entitles a former president to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority; he is also entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts; there is no immunity for unofficial acts.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett concurred with most of the opinion but emphasized that she would have framed the issue differently. In her view, “immunity” is shorthand for two propositions: The President can challenge the constitutionality of a criminal statute as applied to official acts alleged in the indictment, and he can obtain interlocutory review of the trial court's ruling. Her main difference with the majority concerns the admissibility of evidence in the event that a prosecution against a former president proceeds to trial.

Moyle v. United States

Question Presented: Whether EMTALA preempts Idaho's near‑total abortion ban in emergency medical situations.

Holding: Certiorari dismissed as improvidently granted.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh, wrote separately to explain why the Court dismissed the case as improvidently granted. Because the United States had clarified that EMTALA's reach is far more modest than it appeared when the Court granted certiorari and a stay, and because Idaho law had materially changed since the District Court entered the preliminary injunction, Justice Barrett agreed with the decision to dismiss the writ and permit proceedings to run their course in the courts below.

United States v. Rahimi

Question Presented: Whether 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(8), barring firearm possession by those under domestic‑violence restraining orders, violates the Second Amendment.

Holding: When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett agreed that the firearm regulation was constitutional, but wrote separately to briefly explain the premises of originalism and to clarify how courts should apply the history-and-tradition framework. She emphasized that historical analogies must be drawn at the right level of generality and warned against treating the Second Amendment test as a rigid search for near-identical founding-era laws.

Moore v. United States

Question Presented: Whether the Sixteenth Amendment authorizes Congress to tax unrealized sums without apportionment among the states.

Holding: The Mandatory Repatriation Tax, which attributes the realized and undistributed income of an American-controlled foreign corporation to the entity's American shareholders, and then taxes the American shareholders on their portions of that income, does not exceed Congress's constitutional authority.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Alito, concurred in the judgment. She viewed the majority opinion as underplaying the complexity of the issues involved, and while she agreed that the specific tax in question should be upheld, she wrote that a different tax—for example, a tax on shareholders of a widely held or domestic corporation—would present a different case.

Vidal v. Elster

Question Presented: Whether the Lanham Act's “names clause” violates the First Amendment when applied to political criticism of a public figure.

Holding: The Lanham Act's names clause, which prohibits the registration of a mark that consists of or comprises a name, portrait, or signature identifying a particular living individual except by his written consent, does not violate the First Amendment.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Kagan in full and Justices Sotomayor and Jackson in part, concurred in part but criticized the majority's heavy reliance on founding-era history to uphold the Lanham Act's names clause. She argued that the historical record was too thin and ambiguous to do the doctrinal work the majority assigned it. In her view, content-based trademark registration restrictions, whether new or old, are permissible so long as they are reasonable in light of the trademark system's purpose of facilitating source identification.

Trump v. Anderson

Question Presented: Did the Colorado Supreme Court err in ordering President Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot?

Holding: Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the states, responsible for enforcing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against federal officeholders and candidates, the Colorado Supreme Court erred in ordering former President Donald Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett concurred only in part. She agreed that states cannot disqualify presidential candidates under the Fourteenth Amendment, but she did not join the portion of the Court's opinion holding that Section 5 vests in Congress alone the power to enforce Section 3. In her view, this case did not require the Court to address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced. She also emphasized that, given the politically charged nature of this case, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.

United States v. Texas

Summary TK