2021-2022 Granted Cases

On this page, you will find the cases granted thus far by the Supreme Court for the 2020-2021 year organized by subject matter with related links. (Last Updated: August 24, 2021).

Civil Rights 
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (No. 19-1392)

Issues: (1) Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.

Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, P.S.C. (No. 20-601) 

Issues: (1) Whether a state attorney general vested with the power to defend state law should be permitted to intervene after a federal court of appeals invalidates a state statute when no other state actor will defend the law.

Carson v. Makin (No. 20-1088)

Issues: (1) Whether a state violates the religion clauses or equal protection clause of the United States Constitution by prohibiting students participating in an otherwise generally available student-aid program from choosing to use their aid to attend schools that provide religious, or “sectarian,” instruction.

CVS Pharmacy Inc. v. Doe (No. 20-1374)

Issues: (1) Whether Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — and by extension Section 1557 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which incorporates the “enforcement mechanisms” of other federal antidiscrimination statutes — provides a disparate-impact cause of action for plaintiffs alleging disability discrimination.

New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen (No. 20-843)

Issues: (1) Whether the state of New York's denial of petitioners' applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment.

U.S. v. Vaello-Madero (No. 20-303)

Issues: (1) Whether Congress violated the equal-protection component of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment by establishing Supplemental Security Income — a program that provides benefits to needy aged, blind and disabled individuals — in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, and in the Northern Mariana Islands pursuant to a negotiated covenant, but not extending it to Puerto Rico.

Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, P.L.L.C. (No. 20-219)

Issues: (1) Whether the compensatory damages available under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the statutes that incorporate its remedies for victims of discrimination, such as the Rehabilitation Act and the Affordable Care Act, include compensation for emotional distress.

First Amendment
City of Austin, Texas v. Reagan National Advertising of Texas Inc. (No. 20-1029)

Issues: (1) Whether the Austin city code’s distinction between on-premise signs, which may be digitized, and off-premise signs, which may not, is a facially unconstitutional content-based regulation under Reed v. Town of Gilbert.

Houston Community College System v. Wilson (No. 20-804)

Issues: (1) Whether the First Amendment restricts the authority of an elected body to issue a censure resolution in response to a member’s speech.

State Secrets
United States v. Zubaydah (No. 20-827)

Issues: (1) Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit erred when it rejected the United States’ assertion of the state-secrets privilege based on the court’s own assessment of potential harms to the national security, and required discovery to proceed further under 28 U.S.C. 1782(a) against former Central Intelligence Agency contractors on matters concerning alleged clandestine CIA activities.

Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga (No. 20-828)

Issues: (1) Whether Section 1806(f) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 displaces the state-secrets privilege and authorizes a district court to resolve, in camera and ex parte, the merits of a lawsuit challenging the lawfulness of government surveillance by considering the privileged evidence.

Statutory Interpretation
Servotronics Inc. v. Rolls-Royce PLC (No. 20-794)

Issues: (1) Whether the discretion granted to district courts in 28 U.S.C. § 1782(a) to render assistance in gathering evidence for use in “a foreign or international tribunal” encompasses private commercial arbitral tribunals, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 4th and 6th Circuits have held, or excludes such tribunals without expressing an exclusionary intent, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 5th and, in the case below, the 7th Circuit, have held.

Babcock v. Kijakazi (No. 20-480)

Issues: (1) Whether a civil service pension received for federal civilian employment as a “military technician (dual status)” is “a payment based wholly on service as a member of a uniformed service” for the purposes of the Social Security Act’s windfall elimination provision.

American Hospital Association v. Becerra (No. 20-1114)

Issues: (1) Whether deference under Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council permits the Department of Health and Human Services to set reimbursement rates based on acquisition cost and vary such rates by hospital group if it has not collected adequate hospital acquisition cost survey data; and (2) whether petitioners’ suit challenging HHS’s adjustments is precluded by 42 U.S.C. § 1395l(t)(12).

Patel v. Garland (No. 20-979)

Issues: (1) Whether 8 U.S.C. 1252(a)(2)(B)(i) preserves the jurisdiction of federal courts to review a nondiscretionary determination that a noncitizen is ineligible for certain types of discretionary relief.

Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez (No. 19-896)

Issues: (1) Whether an alien who is detained under 8 U.S.C. 1231 is entitled by statute, after six months of detention, to a bond hearing at which the government must prove to an immigration judge by clear and convincing evidence that the alien is a flight risk or a danger to the community.

 

Garland v. Gonzalez (No. 20-322)

Issues: (1) Whether an alien who is detained under 8 U.S.C. 1231 is entitled by statute, after six months of detention, to a bond hearing at which the government must prove to an immigration judge that the alien is a flight risk or a danger to the community; and (2) whether, under 8 U. S. C. 1252(f)(1), the courts below had jurisdiction to grant classwide injunctive relief.

Gallardo v. Marstiller (No. 20-1263)

Issues: (1) Whether the federal Medicaid Act provides for a state Medicaid program to recover reimbursement for Medicaid’s payment of a beneficiary’s past medical expenses by taking funds from the portion of the beneficiary’s tort recovery that compensates for future medical expenses.

Business
Pivotal Software v. Tran (No. 20-1541)

Issues: (1) Whether the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act’s discovery-stay provision applies to a private action under the Securities Act of 1933 in state or federal court, or solely to a private action in federal court.

Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, LP (No. 20-915)

Issues: (1) Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit erred in breaking with its own prior precedent and the findings of other circuits and the Copyright Office in holding that 17 U.S.C. § 411 requires referral to the Copyright Office where there is no indicia of fraud or material error as to the work at issue in the subject copyright registration.

Hughes v. Northwestern University (No. 19-1401)

Issues: (1) Whether allegations that a defined-contribution retirement plan paid or charged its participants fees that substantially exceeded fees for alternative available investment products or services are sufficient to state a claim against plan fiduciaries for breach of the duty of prudence under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, 29 U.S.C. § 1104(a)(1)(B).

Badgerow v. Walters (No. 20-1143)

Issues: (1) Whether federal courts have subject-matter jurisdiction to confirm or vacate an arbitration award under Sections 9 and 10 of the Federal Arbitration Act when the only basis for jurisdiction is that the underlying dispute involved a federal question.

Original Jurisdiction
Mississippi v. Tennessee (No. 220143)

Issues: (1) Whether the Court will grant Mississippi leave to file an original action to seek relief from respondents’ use of a pumping operation to take approximately 252 billion gallons of high-quality groundwater; (2) whether Mississippi has sole sovereign authority over and control of groundwater naturally stored within its borders, including in sandstone within Mississippi’s borders; and (3) whether Mississippi is entitled to damages, injunctive, and other equitable relief for the Mississippi intrastate groundwater intentionally and forcibly taken by respondents.

Criminal Law/Habeas Relief
Thompson v. Clark (No. 20-659)

Issues: (1) Whether the rule that a plaintiff must await favorable termination before bringing a Section 1983 action alleging unreasonable seizure pursuant to legal process requires the plaintiff to show that the criminal proceeding against him has “formally ended in a manner not inconsistent with his innocence,” as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit decided in Laskar v. Hurd, or that the proceeding “ended in a manner that affirmatively indicates his innocence,” as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit decided in Lanning v. City of Glens Falls.

Brown v. Davenport (No. 20-826)

Issues: (1) Whether a federal habeas court may grant relief based solely on its conclusion that the test from Brecht v. Abrahamson is satisfied, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit held, or whether the court must also find that the state court’s application of Chapman v. California was unreasonable under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1), as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 3rd, 7th, 9th and 10th Circuits have held.

Hemphill v. New York (No. 20-826)

Issues: (1) Whether, or under what circumstances, a criminal defendant, whose argumentation or introduction of evidence at trial “opens the door” to the admission of responsive evidence that would otherwise be barred by the rules of evidence, also forfeits his right to exclude evidence otherwise barred by the confrontation clause.

United States v. Tsarnaev (No. 20-443)

Issues: (1) Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit erred in concluding that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s capital sentences must be vacated on the ground that the district court, during its 21-day voir dire, did not ask each prospective juror for a specific accounting of the pretrial media coverage that he or she had read, heard or seen about Tsarnaev’s case; and (2) whether the district court committed reversible error at the penalty phase of Tsarnaev’s trial by excluding evidence that Tsarnaev’s older brother was allegedly involved in different crimes two years before the offenses for which Tsarnaev was convicted.

Wooden v. United States (No. 20-5279)

Issues: (1) Whether offenses that were committed as part of a single criminal spree, but sequentially in time, were “committed on occasions different from one another” for purposes of a sentencing enhancement under the Armed Career Criminal Act.

Shinn v. Ramirez (No. 20-1009)

Issues: (1) Whether application of the equitable rule the Supreme Court announced in Martinez v. Ryan renders the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which precludes a federal court from considering evidence outside the state-court record when reviewing the merits of a claim for habeas relief if a prisoner or his attorney has failed to diligently develop the claim’s factual basis in state court, inapplicable to a federal court’s merits review of a claim for habeas relief.

United States v. Taylor (No. 20-1459)

Issues: (1) Whether 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(3)(A)’s definition of “crime of violence” excludes attempted Hobbs Act robbery, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1951(a).