Strauss also discussed a recent First Amendment decision decided this term involving counseling and gender identity. In Chiles v. Salazar, the Supreme Court last March held that Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy regulates speech based on viewpoint, and the lower courts erred by failing to apply sufficiently rigorous First Amendment scrutiny.

The Court’s opinion failed to grapple with an important point, Strauss said. “We allow the regulation of various kinds of professional practices in ways that could be characterized as viewpoint discrimination,” such as sanctioning attorneys who offer a client advice that constitutes malpractice. “Why isn’t this the same thing?” he asked, adding “the Court just elided that question.”

Strauss also discussed a case involving a geofence warrant, a legal tool that allows law enforcement to search digital databases and identify every smartphone or device that was inside a specific geographic area during a designated time frame. Chatrie v. United States, in which the Law School's Supreme Court and Appellate Clinic is participating as co-counsel, raises questions about how Fourth Amendment protections developed in an earlier era should apply to modern technologies that can track individuals through cellphone location data.

"The underlying issue here,” Strauss said, “is we have a lot of Fourth Amendment categories that were developed in a pre-electronic surveillance, pre-digital world, and the question is how you adapt those to the world we now live in.”

The Second Amendment Revisited

Baude, the Harry Kalven Jr. Professor of Law and co-founder of the Constitutional Law Institute, focused on two areas where the Court continues to refine its constitutional doctrine: the Second Amendment and the unitary executive.

Baude described the Court's modern Second Amendment jurisprudence as an ongoing effort to translate broad constitutional principles into workable legal rules. Following landmark decisions recognizing an individual right to keep and bear arms, the Court is now confronting increasingly difficult questions about how far that right extends and what kinds of regulations remain permissible.

Two pending cases, Wolford v. Lopez and United States v. Hemani, test the boundaries of the Court's history-and-tradition framework for evaluating firearm regulations.

While the outcomes remain uncertain, Baude suggested the Court may continue its recent pattern of expanding Second Amendment protections while avoiding sweeping rulings that could create even broader consequences.

"It's good for them to take some of the cases where they have to struggle," Baude said, noting that difficult cases help courts clarify what constitutional rights mean in practice.

Executive Power and Independent Agencies

Baude also addressed a set of cases involving the unitary executive theory, which concerns the President's authority over officials within the executive branch. Trump v. Slaughter involves the power to remove members of the Federal Trade Commission, while Trump v. Cook involves the power to remove members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors

The disputes could have significant implications for independent federal agencies and for longstanding precedents governing limits on presidential removal power.

At the same time, Baude noted that even justices sympathetic to a stronger presidency may be searching for ways to avoid deciding broader constitutional questions unnecessarily.

One example is the Federal Reserve, which the Court has repeatedly suggested may occupy a unique position among federal institutions.

Baude expressed his belief that the Court is likely to rule against the Administration in effort to remove Lisa Cook from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, given that she has not been afforded much process to defend against a claim of mortgage fraud that “looks pretextual.”

While the Court may decide the case on substantive grounds, it is at least as likely that the court will decide the case in a more limited procedural way, requiring at least some process before firing a member of the Fed, Baude stated. “Here, where the Administration has largely unilaterally made its own conclusion, and relies on its own allegations, you might be able to say that process has not been demonstrated yet,” he added.

Immigration Cases and the Meaning of Citizenship

Huq, the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law, examined two major immigration cases — one consolidated case involving the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of Syrian and Haitian nationals (Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot) and the other birthright citizenship (Trump v. Barbara).

Huq argued that immigration law occupies a distinctive place in constitutional doctrine, often producing different answers to questions about governmental power and judicial review than those found elsewhere in constitutional law.

Huq suggested that the Court’s decision in the TPS case is likely to turn on what process, if any, individuals with TPS are entitled to before losing that status. “It is not entirely clear how the Court will come out on the question,” he added.

The pending birthright-citizenship litigation, he said, ultimately centers on a foundational question: who gets to determine the meaning of the Constitution?

Although the litigation arises from an executive order, Huq suggested the Court is likely to treat the dispute as a direct question of constitutional interpretation rather than one involving deference to either Congress or the executive branch.

"If I had to guess," Huq said, "I would guess that what we will get is a ruling … based on the Court’s own judgment about the meaning of the words ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’” in the Fourteenth Amendment. 

During a lively Q&A session, the discussion expanded beyond the pending cases to broader questions about the Court itself, including its emergency docket, institutional dynamics among the justices, and the role of the judiciary in an increasingly polarized political environment.

While the three panelists offered differing predictions about individual cases, they agreed that many of the term's most consequential disputes raise larger questions about constitutional interpretation, institutional authority, and the role of the Supreme Court in American life.