January 16, 2026

On January 16, the Court had another conference, their second of 2026. Later that day, the Court released a short, unscheduled list of 4 petitions they granted. 

The Court will release its next order list on its next work day, which is Tuesday, January 20 (Monday is MLK Day, which is a federal holiday). The Court will also announce opinions that day, as indicated by an unannounced update to the interactive calendar on the Court's website that occurred on January 16. Notably, this update was reported on by a number of media outlets, such as Bloomberg.

Of course, most attention concerns the pending Trump tariffs case, in which oral arguments happened in November, meaning an opinion could be released at any time--or at least, on any day when the Court will announce opinions. So it is possible the Court will announce this highly anticipated decision on Tuesday. But on the other hand, when the Court indicated on Tuesday, January 6 (in a similar unannounced website calendar change) that it would announce opinions that Friday, there was a lot of media coverage that the Court might be about to announce the tariff decision on that date, e.g. from Barron's. But of course, that was not what happened: the Court announced decisions in only one case that day, and it wasn't the tariff case. Instead, it was a highly technical decision in an obscure facet of federal habeas corpus law in Bowe v. United States. This left much of the media disappointed that the Court didn't give them the big tariff decision they were hotly anticipating. Adam Liptak of the New York Times, for instance, wrote the following on January 9 shortly after the Bowe decision was announced: "Rather than a highly anticipated ruling on President Trump’s tariffs program, it released a tangled and decidedly minor ruling on when federal prisoners may challenge their convictions."

It is also noteworthy that the Court waited until January to release its first opinion in an argued case this term, because usually they don't take this long to release opinions in such cases. Liptak's article specifically pointed out: "Over the last 80 years, the Supreme Court has only once before waited until January to issue its first opinion in an argued case. The reason for that extraordinary lag did not strike lawyers who specialize in Supreme Court advocacy as particularly mysterious: the rise of the emergency docket."

All four of the argued cases that have been decided in the current term were argued in October, which was the first month of the term. This suggests that with the possible exception of the tariffs case, which is clearly much more important and high-profile than most of the Court's cases, the decisions announced on Tuesday will likely be mostly, or entirely, from other cases argued in October. Here are the pending cases argued in October, which therefore seem most likely to be decided on Tuesday:

1. Berk v. Choy
2. Villarreal v. Texas
3. Chiles v. Salazar (high-profile case about whether conversion therapy bans violate the First Amendment)
4. United States Postal Service v. Konan
5. Ellingburg v. United States
6. Louisiana v. Callais (high-profile case about whether the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional in the context of redistricting and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment)

Updated relist watch: The most-relisted petition that was distributed for the January 16 conference is Smith v. Scott, No. 24-1099, which I have discussed in a number of previous posts. Since I have explained it before, I will just briefly explain here that it concerns police officers who want the Supreme Court to reverse the Ninth Circuit's decision denying them qualified immunity for using bodyweight pressure to restrain a 65-year-old mentally ill man named Roy Scott before handcuffing him, and he died shortly afterwards. This petition was relisted for the tenth time on January 12. Second place is a tie between Klein v. Martin, No. 25-51 (Maryland asking the Court to reverse the Fourth Circuit for granting habeas relief to someone convicted of a crime in Maryland state court supposedly in violation of AEDPA), and Reed v. Goertz, No. 24-1268 (a Texas death row inmate arguing that the state's legal framework for death row inmates requesting postconviction DNA testing is unconstitutional). Both petitions were relisted for the ninth time on January 12.