The Supreme Court on Monday morning turned down, without comment, an appeal by an elementary school student who was barred from wearing a baseball cap with a picture of an AR-15 and the words “Come and Take It” to school. The announcement was part of a list of orders released on Monday from the justices’ private conference last week. The justices did not add any new cases to their argument docket for the 2026-27 term.
The justices will meet again for another conference on Thursday, June 11. Orders from that conference will be released on Monday, June 15, at 9:30 a.m. EDT.
The justices denied review in C.S. v. McCrumb, a dispute that began back in 2022 when a then third-grader identified in court filings only as “C.S.” wore the black baseball cap to school for “Hat Day.” School officials asked her to remove the cap; she later went to federal court, where she argued that the officials had violated her right to free speech.
School officials explained that they had been worried that other children would be upset by C.S.’s hat because there had recently been a shooting at a high school 50 miles away. A federal district court in Michigan ruled for the school officials, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld that decision.
C.S. came to the Supreme Court in January, asking the justices to take up her case. She pointed to the court’s landmark 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, holding that a school district violated the First Amendment rights of two students who were suspended for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. The court in Tinker explained that for “school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, it must be able to show that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint.” Here, C.S. contended, “[b]ased on nothing but their speculation about potential emotional harm, school officials … crafted an end-run around Tinker that silenced a third-grader from proclaiming her demonstrated respect for Second Amendment protected rights.”
The school officials emphasized the unique facts of the case – including that “Hat Day” was a “special occasion” on which students were (in a departure from the normal rules) allowed to wear hats during the school day as part of a “Great Kindness Challenge.” They also contended that the 6th Circuit’s ruling was entirely consistent with decisions by other courts of appeals. Like those courts, they said, the 6th Circuit simply “required a ‘reasonable forecast of a substantial disruption’ and examined the records to determine if that standard was satisfied.” But in any event, they added, the school officials are shielded from liability under the doctrine of qualified immunity because it would not have been clearly established – the standard to overcome immunity – in 2022 that C.S. had a right to wear a hat with a gun on it to school.
In a brief order in American Gas Association v. Department of Energy, the justices granted review, threw out a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and sent the case back for that court to reconsider it. The case is a challenge to a set of December 2021 rules that interpreted the Energy Policy Conservation Act to adopt standards for furnaces and water heaters that the members of the gas industry say “will force millions of Americans with gas appliances to either renovate their homes or switch to electric appliances.”
In an opinion issued late last year, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit upheld the rules. Citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo holding that courts are not required to defer to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute, the majority acknowledged that the Department of Energy’s “interpretation of EPCA does not bind us, but ‘it may be especially informative “to the extent it rests on factual premises within . . . [DOE’s] expertise.”’” Because agencies have that kind of expertise, Judge Robert Wilkins wrote, courts have long regarded their interpretations as persuasive, even if not controlling.
The challengers came to the Supreme Court in January, asking the justices to weigh in. But in a brief filed in April, the Trump administration urged the court to send the case back to the D.C. Circuit. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices that the government is “reviewing existing rules—including the ones at issue here—to determine whether they pose ‘an undue burden on the … use of domestic energy resources’ or otherwise conflict with the Administration’s policy priorities.” The December 2021 rules, Sauer wrote, are “factually and legally flawed.”
The court also sent the case of Christopher Coleman, a decorated Army veteran who was sentenced to 46 years in prison for two brutal crimes committed on the same day, back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit for more proceedings.
Coleman served in Afghanistan, where he was seriously injured in combat in a rocket attack in Kandahar in January 2011. Coleman suffered a traumatic brain injury and eventually returned to the United States. In March of that year, after he was released from the hospital and while he was on leave from the Army, Coleman – while “highly intoxicated” – shot Mary Cook-Moore, resulting in extensive injuries that required ongoing care. Later that day, Coleman and a friend attacked a patron at a bar, severely beating him.
Coleman’s appeals and his efforts to obtain post-conviction relief in state court were unsuccessful. Coleman then sought post-conviction relief in federal court in Virginia, which turned him down.
Coleman then went to the 4th Circuit, which ordered the state to resentence him. It concluded that Coleman’s trial lawyer had performed so poorly that he had violated Coleman’s right under the Sixth Amendment to be represented effectively by a lawyer.
The state filed a petition for review earlier this year. It argued (among other things) that the 4th Circuit had violated the “party presentation principle” – the idea, as Rory Little explained last year, that courts can only rely on arguments that the litigants themselves make – just as it had in an earlier case, Clark v. Sweeney, in which the Supreme Court had reversed the 4th Circuit without additional briefing or oral argument. Here, the state argued, although Coleman had not appealed the district court’s ruling that his challenge to one of the judgments against him was filed too late, “the Fourth Circuit granted relief on that judgment anyway.”
In a brief order on Monday, the justices returned the case to the 4th Circuit for it to reconsider the case in light of its decision in Clark v. Sweeney and the party presentation principle.
Additionally, and less than two weeks after the Supreme Court threw out a Mississippi man’s conviction and death sentence on the ground that the judge at his 2006 trial had not properly analyzed whether the prosecutor in Pitchford’s case violated the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination in jury selection, the justices declined to take up the case of another Mississippi man who alleges that prosecutors at his trial violated the same ban.
Tony Terrell Clark was convicted and sentenced to death by a jury made up of 11 white jurors and one Black juror. Prosecutors had used seven of their peremptory strikes – that is, strikes that do not require any explanation – to eliminate Black members of the potential jury pool. According to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, “the prosecution also conducted dubious ‘special investigations into some of the most qualified Black prospective jurors in an attempt to disqualify them,’” and “[m]any of the prosecution’s proffered reasons for striking Black jurors … applied equally to white jurors that it did not strike.”
After Clark’s initial appeals were unsuccessful, he sought post-conviction relief in state court, where he argued that prosecutors had violated the Constitution when they eliminated seven Black jurors from the jury pool and that his trial lawyers had failed to provide him with constitutionally adequate representation because they had not properly challenged the prosecutors’ actions. The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected his argument, and the Supreme Court on Monday refused to weigh in.
Sotomayor agreed with the decision not to take up Clark’s case, but she wrote that the standard that the state supreme court applied was “problematic” and “almost certainly wrong” because it required Clark to show not only that he would have prevailed on his claim that prosecutors violated the Constitution but also that he would have been acquitted. But Clark’s case was not the correct one in which to consider what standard should apply to such cases, she continued, because the Mississippi Supreme Court had also ruled (and Clark did not contest) that Clark’s lawyers’ performance was sufficient.
The court also turned down, without requiring the federal government to file a brief, a challenge to the constitutionality of the requirement that men – but not women – must register for the draft.
Finally, the justices ordered a relatively rare response to a petition asking them to reconsider their denial of review in Citizens Bank v. Conti. The issue in the case is whether the National Bank Act supersedes state laws requiring banks to pay interest on money held in escrow accounts. The court in April turned down a petition from Citizens Bank seeking review of a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit; two weeks later, the bank says, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit issued a decision that is “irreconcilable” with that of the 1st Circuit. Citizens Bank argues in its petition for rehearing that “[f]urther delay” in resolving that conflict among the courts of appeals (one of the main criteria that the justices consider in deciding whether to grant review) “only worsens the landscape for banks, consumers, and state regulators.”
