Supreme Court October Term 2016: A Review of Select Major Rulings

Summary

The Supreme Court term that began on October 3, 2016, was notably different from recent terms at the High Court. It was the first term (1) in thirty years to begin without Justice Antonin Scalia on the Court; (2) since 1987 to commence with a Court made up of fewer than nine active Justices; and (3) since 2010 in which a new member (Justice Neil Gorsuch) joined the High Court. Court observers have suggested that the lack of a fully staffed Supreme Court for the bulk of the last term likely had an impact on the Court’s work both with regard to the volume of cases that the Court heard and the nature of those cases. The Court issued seventy written opinions during the October 2016 term and heard oral arguments in sixty-four cases, numbers that constitute the lightest docket for the Court since at least the Civil War era. Moreover, unlike in recent terms where the Court issued opinions on matters related to abortion and affirmative action, the Court’s docket for the October 2016 term had comparatively very few high-profile issues.

Nonetheless, the October 2016 term featured a number of cases on matters of potential significance to Congress’s work, especially with respect to discrete areas of law. In particular, the Court issued several notable opinions in the areas of intellectual property law, criminal law and procedure, and redistricting. While a full discussion of every ruling from the October 2016 term is beyond the scope of this report, Table 1 provides brief summaries of the written opinions issued by the Court during the last term. Instead, this report focuses its discussion on four particularly notable cases the Court ruled on during the October 2016 term: (1) Matal v. Tam; (2) Sessions v. Morales-Santana; (3) Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer; and (4) Ziglar v. Abbasi.

In Matal v. Tam, a dispute at the intersection of First Amendment and trademark law, the Court concluded that a federal law prohibiting the registration of trademarks that “may disparage” any “persons, living or dead” violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. In a case with potentially significant implications for immigration law, the Supreme Court, in Sessions v. Morales-Santana, ruled that a gender-based distinction in the derivative citizenship rules—under which persons born abroad to a U.S. parent may have U.S. citizenship automatically conferred at birth—violated equal protection requirements. In one of the most closely watched cases of the term, Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, the Court invalidated on free exercise grounds a state grant policy that strictly prohibited the distribution of public funds to religious entities on free exercise grounds. Finally, in Ziglar v. Abbasi, the Supreme Court ruled against extending the judicially created Bivens remedy to certain unlawfully present aliens challenging their detention during investigations following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. The discussion of each of these cases (1) provides background information on the case being discussed; (2) summarizes the arguments that were presented to the Court; (3) explains the Court’s ultimate ruling; and (4) examines the potential implications that the Court’s ruling could have for Congress, including the ramifications for the jurisprudence in a given area of law.