The rarity of Supreme Court do

Yesterday marked 158 years since the ratification of the 14th Amendment. The amendment, which, among other things, guarantees citizenship to “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” was in the spotlight during the 2025-26 term, in large part because of the birthright citizenship case. That was also one of the many things discussed with Cecillia Wang, the national legal director of the ACLU, at our term-in-review event on Wednesday. For more on that, see the On Site section below. Plus, don’t miss SCOTUSblog executive editor Zach Shemtob’s appearance on David Lat’s Original Jurisdiction podcast, where he discussed key takeaways from the 2025-26 term. Morning Reads Trump seeks do-overs at a Supreme Court that rarely grants them John Fritze, CNN At the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump is pursuing “unlikely second chances” in his appeal of a $5 million jury verdict and the birthright citizenship case. His legal team has already asked the court to reconsider its denial of his petition for review on the verdict, and the president has said that he will ask for a rehearing of Trump v. Barbara, in which the court struck down Trump’s executive order seeking to restrict access to birthright citizenship. CNN investigated how common it is for the court to grant such requests, noting that “[t]he last time the Supreme Court entertained a request to review a decision in an argued appeal was in 1965.” “It is extremely rare for the court to grant reconsideration,” said Michael Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell Law School, to CNN. “When it does so, it is typically because some vital information was not before it originally.” It is also rare for the court to reconsider a decision to deny an appeal, although that has happened much more recently. About a year ago, the court “granted such relief ... in a case involving a federal anti-doping law for the horseracing industry.” Campaigning Democrats Amplify Calls to Overhaul Supreme Court Justin Wise and Jordan Fischer, Bloomberg Law On the campaign trail this year, “Democratic candidates are promising to overhaul the Supreme Court and embracing bolder positions ... than the lawmakers they’d replace—a sign of how angry the left is about the direction of the conservative-dominated court,” according to Bloomberg Law. “While calls for change intensified as the biggest decisions landed this spring, it remains to be seen if that new enthusiasm will actually help propel legislation to add justices or institute a binding ethics code should Democrats retake Congress.” 1 year after Supreme Court limited use of nationwide injunctions, groups challenging Trump see shifting legal landscape Melissa Quinn, CBS News Last year, in Trump v. CASA, the court “curbed the ability of federal judges to issue sweeping orders that blocked enforcement of [President Donald] Trump’s plans across the nation.” The decision “sparked fierce criticism, including from” Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who predicted that the decision would send shockwaves through the legal landscape. “But in the 12 months since the Supreme Court curbed the use of nationwide injunctions, the impact of the decision does not appear to be as devastating as critics warned it would be,” according to CBS News. “Instead, plaintiffs navigating a legal terrain that may be more complex in the wake of the ruling have turned to other mechanisms,” such as class-action lawsuits, “to secure broad relief from district courts that are evaluating the legality of Mr. Trump’s policies.” New Hampshire student athletes drop lawsuit over state’s transgender sports ban Ethan DeWitt, New Hampshire Bulletin After the Supreme Court ruled that states can exclude transgender women and girls from female sports teams, two transgender students in New Hampshire have decided to “drop[] their lawsuit against a state law barring them from girls’ sports teams,” according to the New Hampshire Bulletin. “Chris Erchull, a staff attorney at the GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, which helped represent the plaintiffs, confirmed the decision in an interview Wednesday, saying the plaintiffs are no longer participating in New Hampshire sports.” One student has moved away from the state and the other “has quit the girls’ soccer team voluntarily.” “With protestors showing up at games, with opposing teammates not willing to shake her hand at the end of the game, and with the weight of litigation around her neck throughout the years, it was just not fun anymore,” Erchull said. On Site At SCOTUSblog’s term-in-review event, National Legal Director of the ACLU Cecillia Wang speaks about arguing birthright citizenship, the term in general, and what’s next on the organization’s docket By Amy Howe Cecillia Wang, the national legal director of the ACLU, called her April 1 argument in Trump v. Barbara the “most high-stakes and stressful task of my professional life.” Her work (and eventual victory) in Barbara was one of the topics she touched on during a wide-ranging discussion on Wednesday afternoon with Zachary Shemtob, SCOTUSblog’s executive editor, at SCOTUSblog’s term-in-review event. Who is the Supreme Court’s most “ideological” justice? And does that question even make sense? By Adam Feldman In his Empirical SCOTUS column, Adam Feldman analyzed each justice’s judicial ideology, determining how far the members of the court are from neutral – that is, from a 50/50 “conservative-liberal voting” split on both the merits and emergency dockets. He determined that “Alito is the most distant justice overall from 50/50 ‘neutrality,’ … followed closely by Sotomayor on the liberal side.” Justice shopping on the emergency docket? By Taraleigh Davis In her In the Interim column, Taraleigh Davis explored a little-discussed aspect of the court’s work on its emergency docket: refiled applications, which are also called renewed applications. These filings come after the justice assigned to the circuit where a matter originated deny the applicant’s request; the applicant may then refile the same application with any other justice. Davis found that “Justice Sonia Sotomayor receives the most refiles of any justice, by a wide margin,” and that, overall, zero refiles were granted from 2000 through 2024. Podcasts SCOTUS Vibe Check Live from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., Sarah Isgur and David French review the OT25 term with Akhil Amar, professor of law and political science at Yale University, and David Lat, author of Original Jurisdiction. The four break down the most consequential cases of the past term and what it all means for President Donald Trump’s relationship with the court. Justice James Wilson Justice James Wilson is back in the spotlight. As SCOTUSblog contributor Anastasia Boden noted in a review for The Dispatch of journalist Jesse Wegman’s new book on Wilson, he was a “Founder worth remembering” (at the very least, in our eyes, because he was the first and only justice to be jailed while on the bench). Wilson was born on a small farm near St. Andrews, Scotland, in September 1742. Wilson left for the University of St. Andrews at 15 on a scholarship, where he learned about the Scottish Enlightenment and was “deeply influenced” by the idea that humans can “intuit self-evident truths about the world through their common sense and experience.” Although he never returned to Scotland after 1765, as one historian put it, “it never left him.” At 23, Wilson traveled to Philadelphia to start his first job teaching at the College of Philadelphia, but soon traded it for law, apprenticing under John Dickinson (another future founder). In 1774, Wilson published a pamphlet that rejected Parliament’s authority over the colonies, although he believed consent of the governed was best exercised by a “virtuous” (and propertied) few. In 1775, Wilson was elected as a delegate to the First Continental Congress, cast Pennsylvania’s vote for independence in Congress on July 2, 1776, and apparently spoke more often than every delegate but one at the Constitutional Convention. He also helped produce the first draft of the Constitution. Wilson is credited with changing an early draft of the Constitution’s preamble from “The People of the States...” to “We the People.” Passed over by President George Washington for the chief justiceship – first when the post went to John Jay in 1789 and again in March 1796 – Wilson accepted an associate seat and was confirmed by the Senate two days after his nomination in September 1789 as an inaugural member of the court. The six-justice body heard just nine cases during his eight years on the bench, making Wilson’s time on it “not especially noteworthy,” although while riding circuit he was “one of the first justices to exercise judicial review when he refused a petition to hear a case about a veteran’s pension,” reasoning “that this issue was not an issue the courts had jurisdiction over.” Wilson wrote 20 total pages of opinions during his court tenure and spent more time riding circuit than sitting on the Supreme Court. Wilson’s defining opinion came in 1793’s Chisholm v. Georgia, a case brought by the estate of a merchant who had supplied a Georgia regiment with supplies during the Revolution and died waiting to be repaid – the question being, in effect, whether a state could be sued by a citizen of another state. In his opinion (the justices wrote in “seriatim” opinions at the time), Wilson reasoned that America recognized “citizens, but no subjects,” and that the states had surrendered their immunity to the people’s “collective sovereignty,” meaning citizens could sue states other than their own. This proved short-lived: the 11th Amendment was passed within two years, effectively undoing the ruling. Wilson was less impressive when it came to his personal finances. He sank a fortune – by some estimates, interests in more than a million acres – into land speculation. When the Panic of 1796–97 struck, his debts came due – an almost $200,000 bill. He was jailed in a debtor’s prison in Philadelphia, then again in Burlington, New Jersey, before fleeing south, writing to his lawyer that he had “been hunted – I may be hunted – like a wild beast.” He was bailed out by his son and promptly asked in 1797 for the southern circuit – despite it being the most trying of circuits to ride – supposedly in order to escape his creditors. Even his own son’s schooling bore Wilson’s financial chaos: Enrolled at the College of Philadelphia, Bird Wilson attended tuition-free while his father simultaneously became the school’s largest debtor. While staying with fellow Justice James Iredell, Wilson died of a stroke at a tavern in North Carolina in August 1798, having come down with malaria. He was 55, and his death went unpublicized. In 1906, prompted by President Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson’s remains were disinterred and reburied at Philadelphia’s Christ Church — a plot that sits alongside other founders such as Benjamin Franklin, as well as just a “short walk” from the grave of one of his creditors, fellow founding father Pierce Butler. SCOTUS Quote JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: “And you don't think that if – have you ever had soap in your eye, that somebody threw the soap in to cause you pain intentionally? That wouldn't be physical injury to you?” MR. ROTHFELD: “I think that that would be bodily injury within the meaning of the statute.” JUSTICE SCALIA: “How about soap in the mouth? I've had that.” (Laughter.) MR. ROTHFELD: “I'll leave that one alone, Justice Scalia.” — United States v. Castleman (2014) 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, The rarity of Supreme Court do-overs, SCOTUSblog (Jul. 10, 2026, 9:00 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/07/the-rarity-of-supreme-court-do-overs/