April 20, 2026: Updated relist analysis

As expected, the Court released an order list this morning. Also as expected, it finally disposed of some highly-relisted petitions I have discussed on this blog. Most notably, the Court finally granted the petition in Smith v. Scott, No. 24-1099, after a whopping 18 relists--more than any other petition filed in this term (so far) or last term except Veneno v. United States, No. 24-5191, which was denied last November after 21 relists. With Veneno, the relists were clearly at least in part because Gorsuch was working on his dissent from the denial of cert, which Thomas joined. Of course, there may have been some behind the scenes attempts by those two to convince two other justices to grant cert in that case, and that may have delayed the denial of the petition as well. 

With Scott, we now know that the relists were not so the Court (or any of its justices) could work on an opinion, because none was published. Instead, the delays were probably because of internal debates among the justices about whether to grant the petition at all and, if so, what to do next: plenary review in the normal course with oral arguments and briefing, summary reversal, or the option it ultimately chose: grant, vacate, and remand (GVR). Also noteworthy is that though no opinion, dissenting or otherwise, was published accompanying the GVR of the petition in Scott today, the three liberal justices did note their dissents, stating that they would have denied the petition. This means much of the time when this petition was being relisted, those three were probably trying (and failing) to persuade the other six justices not to grant the petition, or at least not to summarily reverse or vacate the 9th Circuit's decision. 

Finally, the GVR order for Scott specifically references a case the Court decided just last month: Zorn v. Linton. There, the Court summarily reversed a 2nd Circuit decision denying qualified immunity to a police officer (Jacob Zorn) who permanently injured a woman (Shela Linton) who was passively participating in a sit-in protest and who posed no danger to the officer whatsoever. The Court chastised the 2nd Circuit for relying on one of its own prior cases to conclude that it was "clearly established" that Zorn violated the Constitution by using excessive force against Linton, and thus that Zorn was not entitled to qualified immunity. 

So clearly, the Court is setting the 9th Circuit up so they have very little choice but to grant qualified immunity to the officers who restrained Scott with bodyweight pressure--after which he died. Similar to the 2nd Circuit in Zorn, the 9th Circuit in Scott relied on a prior 9th Circuit decision holding that kneeling on someone passively resisting was excessive force and violated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but there were some differences between that case and Scott's case. The question is whether those differences are significant enough to conclude that it had not been clearly established that the officers' conduct towards Scott was unconstitutional.

What else did the Court do to the other petitions it had been relisting over and over for months today? Some of them it relisted again, of course, but others it did grant or deny today. Notably, the Court summarily reversed the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in District of Columbia v. R.W., No. 25-248, after 10 relists. This was a case about whether officers had reasonable suspicion necessary to conduct an investigative stop of a juvenile known as R.W., because if they did not, the evidence of juvenile delinquency they found from that stop would be inadmissible at trial under the exclusionary rule. The Court concluded that, contrary to the Court of Appeals' decision, the officers did have reasonable suspicion to stop R.W., and that the Court below had inappropriately excluded certain facts the officers knew about from analyzing whether reasonable suspicion was present in this case. The Supreme Court's opinion in this case was less than 6 pages long in total, but hey, at least we got an opinion at all! (Sotomayor noted her dissent without writing anything, and Jackson wrote a dissent less than 3 pages long.)

The Court also generated numerous headlines today by denying cert in a very high-profile petition challenging school policies that allegedly withhold information about a child's gender identity from their parents. The petition in question, Foote v. Ludlow School Committee, No. 25-77, had been relisted 12 times before being denied today, without so much as a noted dissent. Honestly, this surprised me, since after so many relists and so much attention (within the Court and elsewhere) on this supposed egregious trampling of parental rights to "control" all aspects of their children's identities and lives, I really thought they would at least publish a statement or dissent accompanying the denial (or even grant the petition).

So where does that leave us? The most-relisted petitions that haven't been granted or denied are now a pair of Second Amendment cases challenging state gun control laws: Duncan v. Bonta, No. 25-198, and Gator's Custom Guns v. Washington, No. 25-153. Both were relisted for the 13th time today.