The Jurisprudence of Justice Amy Coney Barrett

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.

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.

Samia v. United States

Question Presented: Whether admitting a codefendant's redacted confession that indirectly implicates a defendant violates the Confrontation Clause.

Holding: The admission of a nontestifying codefendant's confession did not violate the Sixth Amendment's confrontation clause where the confession as modified did not directly inculpate the defendant but used the descriptor “other person” and the jury was instructed to consider the confession only as to the codefendant.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett concurred to defend the majority's treatment of redacted codefendant confessions but wrote separately to push back on the dissent's historical account of the Confrontation Clause. She argued that the historical materials do not clearly establish the categorical rule the dissent proposed and cautioned against reading the founding-era record as far more determinate than it is. In her view, the Court's approach was more consistent with both precedent and the limited clarity of the historical evidence.

New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen

Question Presented: Whether New York's "proper cause" requirement for public carry violates the Second Amendment.

Holding: The requirement violates the Second and Fourteenth Amendments; ordinary self-defense need is sufficient.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett joined the majority establishing the history-and-tradition test for Second Amendment challenges, while writing separately to flag methodological questions about the use of post-ratification history.

Fulton v. Philadelphia

Question Presented: Whether Philadelphia violated the Free Exercise Clause by refusing to contract with a Catholic foster-care agency unless it certified same-sex couples.

Holding: The refusal violated the Free Exercise Clause because the city's system allowed discretionary exemptions.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett concurred to explore whether Employment Division v. Smith should be reconsidered, noting that the original meaning of the Free Exercise Clause remains unclear and expressing caution about what doctrine should replace it.

Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump

Question Presented: Whether IEEPA authorizes the President to impose tariffs.

Holding: IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett joined the majority in full but wrote separately to respond to Justice Gorsuch's concurring opinion advancing his view of the major questions doctrine. She wrote that “while the major questions doctrine has an impressive pedigree as an interpretive principle, this Court has not (yet, anyway) embraced it as a strong-form rule that imposes a ‘clarity tax’ on Congress.”

Biden v. Nebraska

Question Presented: Whether the HEROES Act authorizes the Secretary of Education to cancel large amounts of student-loan principal and whether respondents have Article III standing.

Holding: The Secretary of Education does not have authority under the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 to establish a student loan forgiveness program that will cancel roughly $430 billion in debt principal and affect nearly all borrowers.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett wrote separately to explain her conception of the major questions doctrine. In her view, it is not a new or atextual substantive canon. Rather, it emphasizes the importance of context when a court interprets a delegation to an administrative agency.

Trump v. CASA, Inc.

Question Presented: Whether federal courts may issue nationwide (universal) injunctions blocking enforcement of an executive order beyond the parties to the case.

Holding: Justice Barrett, writing for the five other justices, held that universal injunctions exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts. In her view, courts may only issue injunctions that are no broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.

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.

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.

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.

United States v. Hansen

Question Presented: Whether the federal criminal prohibition against encouraging or inducing unlawful immigration for commercial advantage or private financial gain, in violation of 8 U.S.C. 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) and (B)(i), is facially unconstitutional on First Amendment overbreadth grounds.

Holding: Title 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv), which criminalizes “encourag[ing] or induc[ing]” illegal immigration, forbids only the purposeful solicitation and facilitation of specific acts known to violate federal law and is not unconstitutionally overbroad.

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 originalist premises and methodology 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.

New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen

Question Presented: Whether New York's "proper cause" requirement for public carry violates the Second Amendment.

Holding: The requirement violates the Second and Fourteenth Amendments; ordinary self-defense need is sufficient.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett joined the majority establishing the history-and-tradition test for Second Amendment challenges, while writing separately to flag methodological questions about the use of post-ratification history.

Bost v. Illinois Bd. of Elections

Question Presented: Whether a candidate for federal office has Article III standing to challenge a state's rules for counting mail-in ballots—specifically, Illinois's requirement that ballots postmarked by Election Day but received up to two weeks later must be counted.

Holding: A candidate does have standing to challenge the rules governing the counting of votes in their own election.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett (joined by Justice Kagan) would have held that Congressman Bost had standing because he has sustained a traditional pocketbook injury, not because of his status as a candidate for political office. Because, in her view, the majority created a “bespoke standing rule for candidates,” she concurred only in the judgment.

Murthy v. Missouri

Question Presented: Whether respondents have Article III standing; whether the government's challenged conduct transformed private social-media companies' content-moderation decisions into state action and violated respondents' First Amendment rights; and whether the terms and breadth of the preliminary injunction are proper.

Holding: Respondents, two states and five individual social media users who sued executive branch officials and agencies, alleging that the government pressured the platforms to censor their speech in violation of the First Amendment, lack Article III standing to seek an injunction.

Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer

Question Presented: Does a self-appointed Americans with Disabilities Act “tester” have Article III standing to challenge a place of public accommodation's failure to provide disability accessibility information on its website, even if she lacks any intention of visiting that place of public accommodation?

Holding: Because Deborah Laufer voluntarily dismissed her pending suits under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Laufer's case against Acheson is moot.

United States v. Texas

Question Presented: Whether Texas and Louisiana had standing to challenge federal immigration‑enforcement guidelines.

Holding: Texas and Louisiana lack Article III standing to challenge immigration-enforcement guidelines promulgated by the Secretary of Homeland Security that prioritize the arrest and removal of certain noncitizens from the United States.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Gorsuch, concurred in the judgment. She would have held that states lacked standing because a court could not redress their alleged injury, not because (as the majority held) the states had not asserted a “judicially cognizable interest.”

Equal Protection Clause — United States v. Skrmetti

Question Presented: Whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1, which prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Holding: Tennessee's law prohibiting certain medical treatments for transgender minors is not subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and satisfies rational basis review.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Thomas, wrote separately to explain why transgender status does not constitute a “suspect class” under the Court's Equal Protection Clause precedents. She invoked the Court's decision in Cleburne, which held that when social or economic legislation is at issue, the Equal Protection Clause allows the States wide latitude.

Takings Clause — Sheetz v. El Dorado County

Question Presented: Whether a permit exaction is exempt from the unconstitutional-conditions doctrine as applied in Nollan and Dolan simply because it is authorized by legislation.

Holding: The Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause does not distinguish between legislative and administrative land-use permit conditions.

Taxing Power — 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.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — 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.

Indian Commerce Clause — Haaland v. Brackeen

Question Presented: Whether the Indian Child Welfare Act exceeds Congress's authority or violates anti-commandeering or equal-protection principles.

Holding: In child custody proceedings governed by the Indian Child Welfare Act, the court affirms the 5th Circuit's conclusion that ICWA is consistent with Congress's Article I authority, rejects petitioners' anticommandeering challenges under the Tenth Amendment, and finds the parties lack standing to litigate their other challenges to ICWA's placement preferences.

Spending Clause — Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion Cty. v. Talevski

Question Presented: Whether Spending Clause statutes can create rights enforceable under §1983 and whether the FNHRA provisions at issue do so.

Holding: The provisions of the Federal Nursing Home Amendments Act of 1987 at issue unambiguously create rights enforceable under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, and private enforcement under Section 1983 is compatible with the FNHRA's remedial scheme.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett (joined by Chief Justice Roberts) concurred to emphasize that courts should tread carefully before concluding that Spending Clause statutes may be enforced through § 1983.

Dormant Commerce Clause — National Pork Producers Council v. Ross

Question Presented: Whether California's Proposition 12 violates the dormant Commerce Clause by regulating out‑of‑state pork production.

Holding: The judgment of the 9th Circuit, affirming the dismissal of a complaint challenging California's Proposition 12 under a dormant commerce clause rationale not grounded in an allegation that the law purposefully discriminates against out-of-state economic interests, is affirmed.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett concurred in part. She agreed with the majority that the law could stand because the Court had no way to weigh its benefits and burdens without second-guessing the moral judgments of California voters.

Free Exercise Clause — Fulton v. Philadelphia

Question Presented: Whether Philadelphia violated the Free Exercise Clause by refusing to contract with a Catholic foster-care agency unless it certified same-sex couples.

Holding: The refusal violated the Free Exercise Clause because the city's system allowed discretionary exemptions.

Barrett's View: Justice Barrett concurred to explore whether Employment Division v. Smith should be reconsidered, noting that the original meaning of the Free Exercise Clause remains unclear and expressing caution about what doctrine should replace it.