Jun 11, 2024 - 13:55
By npr.org

What's next up for the Supreme Court? Abortion rights, gun laws and more

Presidential immunity, abortion, guns. The Supreme Court will be issuing major rulings on all these subjects and many more in the next month. With a docket that is unusually loaded with controversial legal questions, the justices are way behind where they usually would be at this point in the term.

Normally, by the second week in June, there are somewhere between four and six really big cases that have not been decided. But this year, there are well over a dozen. And while the court almost always finishes its work by the end of June, this year even some justices are privately predicting they won’t finish until July.

Probably the most headline-grabbing case yet to be resolved is the test of former President Trump’s claim of immunity from criminal charges for his attempts to overturn the Biden electoral victory in 2020. It is the most important test of presidential power since the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision ordering President Nixon to turnover to the Watergate special prosecutor specific — and ultimately incriminating — tape recordings of his White House conversations.

Trump is also implicated in a separate case involving the Jan. 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol, this one involving a federal statute that makes it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding. It is the most serious offense charged against many of the rioters, and Trump is charged as well under the statute.

Aside from those cases, there are other major controversies: two involving abortion, two involving gun regulations and a raft of regulatory cases in which business interests are asking the Supreme Court to limit the federal government’s powers to regulate.