THE US SUPREME COURT’S final stretch before its summer recess ended last week with a flurry of rulings on high-profile cases, including birthright citizenship, the independence of the Federal Reserve, trans athletes, and mail-in ballots.

More ideologically split than in prior terms, the highest court in the nation often divided cleanly along political lines, and its conservative majority prevailed 6-3 in more than a fifth of its rulings this session.

Massachusetts was actively engaged on many of the most important cases, with some of them running through the New England federal courts and Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office often wading in, typically with a coalition of blue state attorneys general.

With opinions in hand, here are some cases decided this year with direct ties to Massachusetts policy interests.

Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (February 20):

The court ruled 6-3, with three conservative justices dissenting, that a 1977 law that gives the president the authority to regulate commerce during national emergencies created by foreign threats does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. The ruling struck down both the “reciprocal” tariffs that President Trump imposed on nearly all trading partners starting last April and earlier fentanyl-related tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act’s grant of authority to “regulate… importation” contains no reference to tariffs or duties, and that the president was overstepping into Congress’s power of the purse.

Massachusetts was one of 12 states that originally sued over the tariffs. State leaders said at the time that Trump’s tariffs on Canadian fuels threatened to raise gas and home heating prices for Bay State consumers by hundreds of millions of dollars, on top of increased costs for dairy, lumber, cars, and seafood.

Chiles v. Salazar (March 31):

The court ruled 8-1, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as the lone dissenter, that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy intended to change a young person’s gender or sexual identity regulates speech based on viewpoint. The justices sent the matter back down to the lower courts for stricter First Amendment scrutiny, with Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion suggesting skepticism that the ban would survive the new test. Campbell had joined a 21-state amicus coalition defending Colorado’s law and said afterward that the decision undermines efforts to protect LGBTQ+ youth.

Massachusetts is one of more than 25 states with its own conversion therapy ban. While the ruling doesn’t have any immediate effect on the Massachusetts law, it clarifies the First Amendment framework any potential future challenge to the state’s ban would have to clear.

First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc. v. Davenport (April 29):

A unanimous court ruled that a faith-based pregnancy center could sue a state in federal court, before state courts issued any rulings, to block a state investigative subpoena examining whether the center violated state consumer protection and charitable oversight laws.

Though the legal question turned on the rights of nonprofits, the case involved politically controversial centers run by anti-abortion activists, with the state’s official position being that the centers are deceptively branded to lure in women seeking help and advice, including, potentially abortion services. The case began as First Choice v. Platkin, brought by a New Jersey pregnancy center resisting a subpoena from the state AG’s “Reproductive Rights Strike Force.”

AG Campbell co-led a 20-state amicus coalition arguing for the opposite outcome — that state courts, not federal courts, should remain the primary venue for subpoena disputes, and that letting recipients leapfrog into federal court would hamper state investigations into everything from consumer protection to antitrust to charitable oversight violations. The ruling establishes that nonprofits, including any Massachusetts organization similarly subpoenaed by the attorney general, now have a clearer path to federal court before state enforcement proceedings play out.

Louisiana v. Callais (April 30):

The court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines that Louisiana’s use of race in creating a second majority-Black congressional district was not justified under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, weakening key provisions of the law. Massachusetts wasn’t a party to the suit, but the Bay State often takes fire from Republicans claiming that gerrymandering is to blame for its all-Democratic Congressional delegation. Gov. Maura Healey said the ruling was a “terrible decision” and other state leaders warned it could limit communities of color’s ability to elect representative candidates at every level of government.

Pung v. Isabella County (June 23):

The court ruled unanimously that the correct measure of “just compensation” after a property is seized and sold by a municipality because of tax delinquency is the auction price, not a property’s possible fair market value, and that Michigan’s process didn’t violate the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause. This is the follow-on case to Tyler v. Hennepin County, the 2023 ruling that found tax-lien “home equity theft” unconstitutional — the same doctrine underlying Massachusetts’s ongoing reckoning with its own tax foreclosure law.

Based on the country’s history of tax sales, the constitution does not require “the government to compensate former owners based on the hypothetical fair market value of their property,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote.

Wolford v. Lopez (June 25):

The court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines that Hawaii’s law requiring express property-owner consent before a concealed-carry permit holder can bring a handgun onto private property open to the public — the so-called “vampire rule” — violates the Second Amendment. Justice Alito’s majority opinion discussed the landmark Bruen case, which four years ago prompted states like Hawaii and Massachusetts to revise their now-unconstitutional “may issue” licensing traditions. These earlier licensing rules allowed a broad amount of discretion to law enforcement agencies to determine if someone had a good reason to need a firearm license, which the US Supreme Court in Bruen decided was not in line with historical Second Amendment tradition.

The new ruling narrows the menu of options available to any state looking to restrict concealed carry on privately owned but publicly accessible property. Private property owners are still allowed to prohibit carrying firearms on their property, but the government action in Hawaii is presumptively unconstitutional, Alito wrote.

Mullin v. Doe (June 25):

The court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines that the Temporary Protected Status statute largely bars judicial review of the US Department of Homeland Security’s decision to terminate a country’s TPS designation, clearing the way for the administration to end protections for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. State leaders said the decision will have severe consequences for Massachusetts, where thousands of TPS holders work in health care and elder care. Campbell’s office put the number of Haitian TPS holders in Massachusetts at approximately 45,000, with about 1,500 in nursing care facilities alone.

Chatrie v. United States (June 29):

The court ruled 6-3, with three conservative justices dissenting, that geofence warrants constitute Fourth Amendment searches. These warrants compel tech companies like Google to hand over identifying information on every phone that passed through a specific area during a specific window of time. The majority opinion, authored by Justice Elana Kagan, extends Carpenter v. United States, which found that cellphone location records carry a reasonable expectation of privacy, to this newer investigative tool.

Massachusetts lawmakers are currently debating the policies that should govern this kind of data, in part out of concern that the government could demand information on individual locations. Data privacy bills passed by the House and Senate include a ban on the sale of precise geolocation data — the same category of information at issue in Chatrie — though the bills differ on scope of consent requirements and enforcement mechanisms.

Watson v. Republican National Committee (June 29):

The court ruled 5-4, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett writing for the majority, that federal election-day statutes don’t require mail ballots to be received by Election Day, upholding a Mississippi law that counts ballots postmarked on time but received up to five days later. Massachusetts has its own mail-ballot grace period, and a parallel case is rolling through the courts now: the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and other groups sued over a Trump executive order attempting to restrict mail-in voting and compel changes to state ballot-receipt rules.

West Virginia v. B.P.J. (June 30):

The court ruled 6-3, along ideological lines, that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause prevents states from limiting girls’ and women’s school sports teams to biological females, upholding laws in West Virginia and Idaho that bar transgender girls and women from competing on those teams. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority that Title IX’s use of “sex” means biological sex and that schools may maintain separate teams on that basis, upholding the roughly 27 state bans already on the books but without requiring any state to adopt one.

Massachusetts law states that transgender and nonbinary students must be permitted to play on the team consistent with their gender identity, a policy the state Supreme Judicial Court has upheld against a prior challenge. Gov. Healey told reporters that the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association may have discretion over the ruling’s local impact, in case the state or any local municipality considered a similar ban. The Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth condemned the ruling as telling “transgender youth that their humanity is conditional and that their participation in school and community life is subject to political debate.”

Trump v. Barbara (June 30):

In the closely watched birthright citizenship case, the court ruled 6-3 that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment. This strikes down an executive order signed by Trump on his first day back in office, which leaned on a theory that such children aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, traced the Citizenship Clause back through English common law and the court’s 1898 ruling granting citizenship to a child born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents, and rejected the administration’s argument that citizenship should turn on a parent’s “domicile” rather than simple birth on US soil.

Campbell co-led a coalition amicus brief in February defending birthright citizenship, the ACLU of Massachusetts was among the plaintiffs’ groups, and a federal judge in Massachusetts had also issued one of the earlier preliminary injunctions blocking the order while litigation proceeded.