Supreme Court Term 2025-2026

The Department of Justice sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission and its members, demanding the state produce its full, unredacted voter file, which contains highly sensitive and personal data on every voter in the state. This suit appears to be part of the federal government's efforts to build a national voter database without congressional authorization and to improperly question the validity of state voter rolls.

On September 4, 2026, the ACLU, ACLU of D.C. and the National Press Photographers Association filed an amicus brief to urge the court to block airspace restrictions on drone flights, banning such flights over any Department of Homeland Security (DHS) facility or “mobile asset,” which includes any DHS vehicle.

The ACLU's Center for Liberty and State Supreme Court Initiative, alongside the ACLU of Georgia, filed an amicus brief in the Georgia Supreme Court supporting a grieving mother challenging the removal of her children without notice, a hearing, or any finding that the children faced danger because one of her children had just died by suicide. A Georgia appellate court found that the State can take children from a parent ex parte—before the parent is ever heard—whenever circumstances are "exceptional," which the court below defined to mean merely "unusual" rather than a genuine emergency. The juvenile court later returned the children, finding no basis for their removal and reprimanded the State for further traumatizing a grieving family. Because these removals are brief and the appeals process is slow, the practice largely evades review, and it falls hardest on the families with the least resources to challenge these kinds of removals. Our brief urges the court to require a genuine emergency before the State may remove a child without first hearing from their parent.

A group of midwives and doctors filed a lawsuit in state court challenging actions by the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH), which imposed a de facto ban on freestanding birth centers throughout Alabama. Birth centers provide midwifery care to low-risk pregnant patients, a model of care that is proven to be safe and beneficial to patients. Despite that, ADPH took actions that forced one center to abruptly shut down in 2023 despite a perfect safety record, and then passed onerous regulations that would require birth centers to meet hospital-like standards, preventing birth centers from operating in the state. After hearing oral argument in late September 2023, the Circuit Court of Montgomery County granted our request for a Preliminary Injunction on September 30, 2023, preventing ADPH from refusing to timely license freestanding birth centers that comply with nationally-recognized safety standards for birth centers while litigation continues. In May 2025, the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit Court issued judgment in Plaintiffs’ favor on Plaintiffs’ threshold claim that freestanding birth centers are not “hospitals” under Alabama law and, therefore, the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) has no authority to require them to be licensed as such. However, on appeal in January 2026, the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals reversed the lower court's decision, and in May 2026, the Alabama Supreme Court declined the Plaintiffs’ request for further review, leaving the Civil Appeals Court’s decision in place. The case now returns to the Circuit Court of Montgomery County where Plaintiffs will continue litigating other claims arguing that, even if ADPH has authority to require licenses for birth centers, the specific licensing rules ADPH adopted for freestanding birth centers unlawfully burden Alabamians’ access to birth center care.