How Americans feel about possible court reforms

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on this day in 2020 after 27 years on the Supreme Court. Please consider joining us on LinkedIn Live on Thursday, Sept. 24, for a discussion between Amy and Briefly’s Adam Stofsky about the upcoming term. They will explore notable cases scheduled for argument, wrestling with what they could mean for businesses, governments, institutions, and individuals. Register here for the event, which will begin at 1 p.m. EDT. At the Court The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to clear the way for it to use the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls. On Tuesday, the groups challenging this plan filed a response to the administration’s request. The dispute is now fully briefed, and the court’s decision could come at any time. On Thursday, the court denied a request for a stay of execution from Jeffery Lee, who was sentenced to death in 2000 for killing Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson while robbing a pawnshop. Lee was scheduled to be executed by nitrogen gas in June, but a federal district judge barred Alabama from proceeding after Lee challenged the execution plan on Eighth Amendment grounds. The Supreme Court at that time turned down the state’s request to allow Lee’s execution to proceed as scheduled. On Thursday night, following the court’s denial of his subsequent stay of execution, Lee was executed by lethal injection. Morning Reads Marquette Law School Poll finds approval of United States Supreme Court declines from 47% to 43% Kevin Conway, Marquette Today Marquette Law School Poll’s latest national survey explored how Americans feel about proposed changes to the Supreme Court, such as increasing the number of justices. “Enforcing a strict ethics code for the justices is nearly universally popular, favored by 89%,” and there is also strong support (79%) for “[h]aving justices serve a fixed term rather than a life term.” Americans are more divided over adding justices, however, with 53% expressing support and 47% expressing opposition. Researchers also found that approval of the Supreme Court fell from 47% to 43% over the past two months, driven by a three-percentage-point drop “among both Republicans and Democrats.” “Approval in September is the second lowest rating since January 2025.” Appeals court weighs Trump-backed Missouri congressional map despite Supreme Court block David A. Lieb, Associated Press On Thursday, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit “consider[ed] an attempt to resurrect new Missouri congressional districts backed by President Donald Trump, even though the U.S. Supreme Court blocked those districts from being used in the November election,” according to the Associated Press. “An attorney representing Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Onder and state Sen. Rick Brattin – the GOP nominee in the 5th District – suggested to appeals court judges that there still is time to revert to the Trump-backed map.” “The appeals court judges indicated they would rule quickly, noting any decision they make is likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Justice Sotomayor concerned Americans may not be able to ‘keep’ republic Randy Krehbiel, Tulsa World Justice Sonia Sotomayor visited the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa on Wednesday and reflected on the state of the country, urging audience members to do what they can to protect the American republic. “Referring to Benjamin Franklin’s famous statement that the 1787 Constitutional Convention had created ‘a republic, if you can keep it,’ Sotomayor said she is ‘terribly worried that people don’t understand’ the commitment necessary to do that,” according to Tulsa World. She added that the country needs to commit more resources to civics education. “Schools are just not teaching it, and our kids are not learning it. And if they don’t learn it, we’re not going to keep our republic,” Sotomayor said. “So that is my greatest fear: that people don’t understand our system of government. They don’t understand what the First Amendment means. Some of my colleagues don’t either, by the way. And I’m not joking about that.” US appeals court blocks Kalshi from offering event contracts on Native American lands Jonathan Stempel, Reuters The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit “blocked Kalshi on Wednesday from offering sports event contracts on the lands of two California tribes, handing the largest U.S. prediction markets platform its second legal setback in less than a month,” according to Reuters. The 9th Circuit said the tribes “deserved a preliminary injunction because they would likely show that Kalshi’s contracts violated the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and the tribes’ own gaming ordinances.” Reuters noted that “[t]he decision adds to legal challenges facing prediction market operators, amid a nationwide dispute over whether platforms that let people wager on sports and other events should be regulated as gambling or as federally licensed financial markets.” “Many analysts expect the U.S. Supreme Court to eventually decide who should regulate prediction markets.” Are Trump’s Official Papers His Personal Property? Adam Liptak, The New York Times In his newsletter for The New York Times, Adam Liptak explored a dispute over President Donald Trump’s official papers and why justices’ papers are playing a role in it. “Supreme Court justices work for the government but treat their official papers as private property. As my frequent reporting partner Jodi Kantor wrote this month, that means they can withhold them from the public until long after they have died, or destroy them entirely,” Liptak wrote. “In a brief filed last week in a federal appeals court, the Trump administration twice cited Jodi’s article to argue that presidents should have the same power. A 1978 law requires White House documents to be preserved and disclosed relatively soon after the president leaves office. The brief says that law violates the Constitution.” On Site At annual SCOTUSblog Summit, Sen. Durbin and Rep. Issa express differing views on Supreme Court By Amy Howe At the 2026 SCOTUSblog Summit on Wednesday, attendees heard from legal experts and lawmakers about a variety of aspects of the Supreme Court’s work. Here’s Amy’s overview of the event. What a missing citation tells us about the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision By César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández In his Immigration Matters column, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández revisited the Supreme Court’s June ruling striking down President Donald Trump’s first executive order on birthright citizenship, exploring the potential significance of Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision not to “ground his assessment of citizenship in a long history of treating it as fundamental to modern life.” How courts keep getting Bruen wrong By Pete Patterson In 2022’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court held that New York’s concealed carry law violated the Second Amendment. “In doing so,” as Pete Patterson wrote in a column for SCOTUSblog, “the court established a two-step analysis for determining whether one’s rights had been violated.” But, over the past four years, circuit courts have struggled to apply this test. Patterson reflected on what’s going wrong. Podcasts Looking Ahead to the Supreme Court Term From the SCOTUSblog Summit, Sarah Isgur, David French, and Amy Howe discuss the cases scheduled thus far for the Supreme Court’s 2026-27 term. Justice Smith Thompson When historian Donald Roper told people he was writing a biography of Smith Thompson, the consistent reply, even from constitutional scholars, was “who is Smith Thompson?” Roper had a partial answer, albeit one borrowed from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: while Chief Justice John Marshall “was great because he was there,” Thompson “was there but was not great.” (Holmes had delivered a famously lukewarm tribute to Marshall.) Thompson, as Roper noted, sat on the same court during those same years, resulting in what a different historian rather unenthusiastically described as a “diligent and unspectacular but above-average performance.” Thompson was born in Dutchess County, New York, in January 1768. His father reportedly accumulated thousands of acres, put money into a lead mine, and bought up confiscated loyalist property, building lots in the new capital. Thompson’s father also sat in New York’s 1788 ratifying convention, as did his uncle, leading Antifederalist Melancton Smith. Thompson graduated from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1788, taught briefly, and clerked in the Poughkeepsie office of Gilbert Livingston and James Kent. Kent, later an influential legal authority of the era, was not a fan of Thompson. Decades later, he described him as a clerk who was “a plain, modest, humble, ignorant young man with narrow views and anti-federal politics. His mind did not expand and his principles became liberal very slowly.” (Kent’s resentments may have been influenced by Thompson taking his place as Livingston’s partner in 1793 and then marrying Livingston’s daughter the next year.) Despite his supposed modesty, humility, and ignorance, Thompson won a state assembly seat in 1800, sat in the 1801 state constitutional convention, turned down an appointment as district attorney, and in 1802 joined the New York Supreme Court. He declined the position of mayor of New York in 1807, apparently preferring the security of life tenure, succeeded Kent as chief justice in 1814, and, over 16 years, wrote roughly 250 opinions. One, In re Waldron, kept a young girl with her maternal grandfather rather than her father because the court should “principally [] be directed” by “the benefit and welfare of the infant.” (The case was an early instance of “state courts’ overriding concern [in] the best interests of the children.”) President James Monroe chose Thompson as his secretary of the Navy in 1818, apparently with no other candidate in mind. Monroe then gave him a recess appointment to the Supreme Court in September 1823, which Thompson accepted only after concluding that his 1824 presidential hopes were for naught. Confirmed that December, he did not take his seat until Feb. 10, 1824, due to his daughter’s death – one day after the court finished hearing the landmark case of Gibbons v. Ogden, which held the federal government has the authority to regulate interstate commerce under the commerce clause. While on the court in 1828, Thompson ran for governor of New York and lost what one account called a “caustic campaign.” He was also close to future President Martin Van Buren, whose fourth son, Smith Thompson Van Buren, was named after Thompson. On the court, Thompson’s states’ rights convictions regularly left him on the other side of Marshall, and he was, in Roper’s words, “unwilling to suffer in silent disagreement.” His commerce views were developed early – on the New York court in Livingston v. Van Ingen, Thompson wrote that sovereign powers not delegated to the federal government “are retained by the states,” and in 1837’s New York v. Miln he agreed that a state can legislate on subjects within the commerce powers so long as no act of Congress stands in the way. In Kendall v. United States, his majority opinion held that a court could order an executive officer to perform his duty – at the attorney general’s request, he cut a passage rejecting the Jacksonian notion that a president may act on his own reading of the Constitution. Perhaps his most admired work came in an 1831 dissent in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, where Thompson argued that the Cherokee were an independent sovereign nation entitled to be heard (“despite their weakened status”), a view the court agreed with the following year in Worcester v. Georgia. Riding circuit in 1839, Thompson ruled that American courts lacked power over the Amistad murder and mutiny charges, which arose on a Spanish vessel within Spanish waters, and he later joined Justice Joseph Story’s 1841 opinion freeing the Amistad’s captives. Thompson died at age 75 in Poughkeepsie in December 1843. Filling his seat took President John Tyler six nominations and 437 days before Samuel Nelson was confirmed in February 1845. Thompson held a high state or federal office for more than 40 consecutive years and may have been the best-credentialed justice to join the court before the Civil War. The Navy named a destroyer for him in 1919. SCOTUS Quote MR. MAZIARZ: “In one of the cases the arrestee went to his vehicle but simply took off and led the police on a high-speed chase, but none in – where they went to the vehicle and grabbed a weapon.” JUSTICE SOUTER: “Did he – did he have – have his hands handcuffed behind his back?” MR. MAZIARZ: “Yes. Yes, he had –” JUSTICE SOUTER: “And he was able to drive the car?” MR. MAZIARZ: “Yes. Well, Your Honor, it's my understanding – I'm not an expert on this, but it's my understanding from reading some of these cases –” JUSTICE SOUTER: “I'd really like to meet him.” (Laughter.) JUSTICE SCALIA: “I wouldn't.” — Arizona v. Gant (2009) Kelsey Dallas is SCOTUSblog's managing editor and the primary author of the SCOTUStoday newsletter. Nora is an editorial assistant at SCOTUSblog, based in Washington, D.C. Recommended Citation: Kelsey Dallas & Nora Collins, How Americans feel about possible court reforms, SCOTUSblog (Sep. 18, 2026, 9:00 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/09/how-americans-feel-about-possible-court-reforms/