Supreme Court Term 2025-2026

On behalf of Doctors for America, the ACLU and several partner organizations are intervening to vigorously defend pregnant patients' right to receive, and for physicians to provide, health- and life-saving abortion care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA). This federal law has required hospitals with emergency departments to provide stabilizing treatment, including abortion, to patients experiencing medical emergencies for nearly four decades.

On January 24, 2024, the ACLU and ACLU of Florida filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit supporting HM Florida-ORL, which operates the restaurant and bar Hamburger Mary’s in Orlando, in its lawsuit alleging that a Florida law infringes upon minors’ First Amendment rights by prohibiting them from attending drag performances.

This case presents two questions: first, whether, under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article I, section 7 of the Tennessee Constitution, Union City Police Department officers possessed probable cause to conduct a warrantless search of the defendant’s vehicle based exclusively on the alleged odor of cannabis, and second, whether the Court of Appeals had jurisdiction to overturn the defendant’s conviction. The ACLU’s Criminal Reform Legal Project and State Supreme Court Initiative, along with the ACLU of Tennessee filed an amicus brief arguing first, that after Tennessee’s legalization of hemp in 2019, an officer’s alleged detection of the odor of cannabis is insufficient to establish probable cause to conduct a warrantless search of a vehicle in Tennessee, and second, that the court of appeals improperly held that it lacked jurisdiction to overturn the defendant’s conviction.

The Trump Administration is threatening the future of Head Start, a program that has provided critical and evidence-based services — from education to childcare — to more than 40 million children and their families. The Administration by gutting Head Start staff and resources, delaying funding, and prohibiting activities that “advance or promote” “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility,” is irreparably harming the young children and low-income families who rely on Head Start.