The U.S. Supreme Court delivered far-reaching rulings on civil rights issues this term, dealing a major blow to federal voting-rights protections while expanding gun rights, upholding restrictions on transgender athletes' participation in women's sports and preserving birthright citizenship.

Here, Law360 takes a closer look at four of the term's biggest civil rights decisions, and what legal scholars say they could mean for access to justice going forward.

Birthright Citizenship Survives

The term ended June 30 with a blockbuster ruling in Trump v. Barbara, in which a 6-3 majority declared that the 14th Amendment guarantees a right to American citizenship to virtually all children born on U.S. soil, including those born to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present in the country, rejecting President Donald Trump's executive order seeking to deny citizenship to those children.

Had that executive order been allowed to stand, it could have spawned a new group of stateless, noncitizen children, immigrants rights groups warned after its issue.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, concluded that the citizenship clause guarantees the long-standing common-law principle of "jus soli" — citizenship based on place of birth — and that children born in the United States are "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States regardless of their parents' immigration status.

"Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth," he wrote.

In his opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett, Justice Roberts wrote that the Constitution contains only narrow exceptions to birthright citizenship, such as children of foreign diplomats or members of sovereign tribal nations as understood at the time of ratification.

The majority embraced a traditional reading of the 14th Amendment that sees it as a response to Dred Scott v. Sandford, the infamous 1857 decision that held that enslaved and free Black people, as descendants of enslaved ancestors, were not citizens of the United States.

In doing so, the court also reaffirmed the 1898 landmark ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the Supreme Court first established that any person born in the United States, regardless of their parents' citizenship or nationality, automatically becomes a U.S. citizen under the amendment, a legal concept that traces its roots to English common law.

"Not surprisingly, then, in the 128 years since, we have repeatedly understood the rule of Wong Kim Ark to guarantee citizenship to all children born in the United States and subject to its power," Justice Roberts wrote. "We see no reason to depart from that view today."

Trump's executive order, which the president signed on the day he returned to the White House for a second term, argued that the children of parents who are either in the country illegally or are present only temporarily — on a tourism or study visa, for instance — are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction and cannot be considered citizens.

Gerald L. Neuman, a scholar at Harvard Law School, told Law360 in an email that the majority's opinion "is clearly correct" on the constitutional issue.

"The account it gives is the traditional account, and it is good to have it retold by John Roberts," he said.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired professor of immigration law at Cornell University Law School and a leading author on the subject, said in a statement to reporters that although the ruling in Trump v. Barbara marked a "historic loss" for the president, his administration was "winning its war on immigrants."

Yale-Loehr said the Trump administration so far has imposed more than 700 restrictions touching a wide range of immigration policy restrictions, suspending visa processing for dozens of countries, halting refugee admissions except for white South Africans, ramping up detentions and deportations, increasing denaturalization efforts, curtailing asylum, and terminating temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people.

Court Further Weakens the Voting Rights Act

Another highly consequential ruling this term came in a joint decision in Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, where a 6-3 majority dramatically curtailed the ability of minority voters to challenge electoral maps under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

After the 2020 Census, Louisiana enacted a congressional map with only one majority-Black district. A federal court held that the map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it should contain a second majority-Black district.

In response, Louisiana enacted S.B. 8, creating a map that contained a second majority-Black district. Opponents challenged S.B. 8 as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.

Writing for the majority in the April 29 ruling, Justice Samuel Alito said Section 2 "was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it," concluding that while compliance with the statute may justify race-conscious districting in some circumstances, it did not do so in Louisiana's case.

"The Constitution almost never permits the federal government or a state to discriminate on the basis of race," Justice Alito wrote. "Allowing race to play any part in government decisionmaking represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context."

The ruling, which split the court along ideological lines, marked a sharp departure from the court's 2023 decision in Allen v. Milligan, which preserved the basic framework used to assess claims that district maps dilute minority voting strength and required Alabama to create a second district in which Black voters predominated.

"It was the same court, the same circumstances, but somehow internally something shifted in the court," Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor and leading election law scholar, told Law360.

Stephanopoulos said the new decision effectively rewrites that framework, which the Supreme Court established in 1986 with the landmark ruling in Thornburg v. Gingles, in a manner that will make future Section 2 challenges exceedingly difficult to win. He called it a "monumental decision" that he says will have negative consequences for minority representation in America.

"In terms of the impact, it is, I think, disastrous," he said. "The Voting Rights Act is one of the most important American laws of the last 50 years, 60 years. The most important section of the law is Section 2, which was the driver of improving minority representation across the country, and now the court has completely strangled that provision."

Stephanopoulos said the court's new approach could allow states to dismantle existing minority-opportunity districts with little fear of successful Voting Rights Act litigation. He pointed to states including Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina as places where lawmakers may now be able to redraw districts that had previously been viewed as protected by federal law.

The effects, he said, are likely to extend beyond congressional districts to state legislative maps across the country, and the ramifications could reach well beyond redistricting.

Stephanopoulos said the majority's reasoning reflects a broader skepticism toward race-conscious remedies and could eventually be used to chip away at other landmark civil rights statutes, including the Fair Housing Act and portions of the Civil Rights Act.

In the long run, Stephanopoulos said, the ruling could produce a historic decline in minority political representation. He compared its potential impact with the rollbacks of civil rights advances that followed Reconstruction.

"We're going to see the biggest drop in representation for minority voters, probably ever, in American history," he said

Court Continues Expansion of Gun Rights

The court also continued its expansion of Second Amendment protections through a pair of rulings that limited the government's ability to regulate who may possess firearms and where licensed gun owners may carry them.

On June 18, in United States v. Hemani, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the federal ban on firearm possession by unlawful users of controlled substances violated the Second Amendment.

One week later, this time with a 6-3 majority, in Wolford v. Lopez the court invalidated a Hawaii law barring licensed concealed-carry permit holders from bringing firearms onto private property open to the public without the owner's express permission, concluding that the measure violated the Second and 14th amendments.

Taken together, the decisions reinforced the court's commitment to the framework established in the court's landmark 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which requires federal and state governments to prove that their firearm regulations are analogous to historical restrictions for them to survive constitutional scrutiny.

Hayley Lawrence, an assistant professor at Duke University School of Law and executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, told Law360 that the term's gun rights decisions signal the court's continuing effort to elevate the Second Amendment to the same constitutional status as other fundamental rights.

"The Supreme Court has been very clear and concerted in its effort to save the Second Amendment from what it thinks, or at least the majority thinks, is second-class status," she said.

The first case involved Ali Hemani, a dual U.S.-Pakistani citizen born in Texas who lived with his parents in the Dallas area. In 2022, federal agents searching his family's home as part of a terrorism-related investigation found a handgun and a small amount of marijuana. Hemani cooperated with investigators, surrendered the firearm, pointed agents to the marijuana and acknowledged that he used marijuana "about every other day."

More than six months later, prosecutors charged him under Section 922(g)(3) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, a federal law prohibiting any "unlawful user of" a controlled substance from possessing a firearm, relying solely on his admitted marijuana use.

Writing for the court's majority in Hemani, Justice Neil Gorsuch rejected the government's comparison to historical laws regulating "habitual drunkards," concluding those laws targeted individuals who were incapacitated or demonstrably dangerous rather than categorically disarming all unlawful drug users.

At the same time, Justice Gorsuch emphasized that the court's ruling left open the possibility that lawmakers could prohibit firearm possession by people with addictions, intoxicated individuals or other people who can be determined to pose a danger through individualized assessments.

"In many respects, this case is a narrow one," Justice Gorsuch wrote.

The decision in Wolford, however, is likely to have broader practical consequences.

Writing for the six-justice majority, Justice Alito said Hawaii had attempted to circumvent the legal framework established in Bruen by replacing the common-law presumption that licensed gun owners may carry firearms onto private property open to the public unless a property owner says otherwise with a default rule requiring express permission before carrying a firearm onto such property.

Justice Alito emphasized the burden the law imposed on gun owners, noting that it could bar them from entering many of the businesses they routinely visit in their day-to-day lives, including gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants, pharmacies and other retail establishments.

"This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives," he wrote.

Lawrence described Wolford as "potentially more significant" than Hemani, saying it broadens the practical scope of the right to public carry by making armed entry onto businesses and other private property open to the public the default rule unless a property owner opts out.

Private property owners remain free to prohibit firearms, she said, but a state cannot make that default presumption "on the public's behalf."

Lawrence said Wolford does not call into question the traditional sensitive places recognized by the Supreme Court, such as schools and government buildings. Instead, she said, the decision leaves unresolved whether states can create newer categories of sensitive locations that could be deemed constitutional under the Bruen decision. The court, she said, could turn to that question in the near future.

"The sensitive-places question is also on their list of things to get to," she said.

Court Upholds State Bans on Transgender Athletes

On the term's last day, the Supreme Court upheld laws enacted by West Virginia and Idaho barring transgender girls and women from competing on female school sports teams, ruling that the restrictions are consistent with both the equal protection clause and Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education programs.

The consolidated cases, Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., were brought by two transgender students whose attorneys argued that the laws unconstitutionally excluded them from participating in school sports consistent with their gender identity.

B.P.J., a transgender girl in West Virginia, sought to compete on her middle school's girls cross-country and track teams. Lindsay Hecox, a transgender student at Boise State University, played on the womens club soccer team and sought to try out for the university's NCAA Division I womens cross-country and track teams after Idaho enacted its Fairness in Women's Sports Act.

Both plaintiffs argued that they had undergone medical treatment, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, that eliminated any meaningful athletic advantage associated with their sex assigned at birth. As applied to them, they argued, the state laws did not advance the states' stated interests in promoting competitive fairness and protecting the safety of female athletes.

Writing for the six-justice majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected that argument, concluding that the Constitution does not require legislatures to determine on a case-by-case basis whether a transgender athlete has retained a competitive advantage after hormone therapy or puberty suppression.

"The legislatures and the schools are better equipped — and under the Constitution, are the more appropriate entities — to assess the competing medical and scientific considerations and draw appropriate lines," Justice Kavanaugh wrote. "Of course, no line that the states draw will satisfy everyone. But the judiciary is not the proper institution to make what would often be arbitrary and highly intrusive athlete-by-athlete assessments."

Justice Kavanaugh also emphasized that the court's decision rested on what it described as the "inherent physical differences" between "biological males" and "biological females" and accepted the states' arguments that those differences justify categorical rules designed to promote competitive fairness and athlete safety.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, argued that the majority "prematurely" resolved "deeply sensitive" disputed factual issues that lower courts had not yet addressed.

Jessica Clarke, a professor at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law, said the practical effect of the ruling is to leave decisions about transgender participation in school sports largely in the hands of state legislatures, with federal courts playing a much more limited role in reviewing those policies.

Clarke said the majority applied the standard of constitutional review known as intermediate scrutiny in a way that gave state legislatures broad latitude to enact categorical bans.

"They applied the standard in the wrong way to reach an outcome that was predetermined," she said. "The court is surely aware of public opinion on this question. Transgender girls' and women's participation in sports: very unpopular. It was a big political issue."

The decision, Clarke said, leaves important questions unresolved because the majority repeatedly framed its analysis around the unique concerns presented by competitive sports. As a result, she said, lower courts will now have to decide whether the opinion's reasoning extends to other disputes involving transgender rights, such as access to sex-separated facilities.

"The big question is restrooms," she said. "What's going to happen with lower court precedents that say that schools can't exclude trans kids from restrooms consistent with their gender identity?"

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.