Year
Issue Area
Court
2026
Rio Grande Foundation v. Oliver
Question Presented
1. Whether New Mexico’s informational interest is sufficient under exacting scrutiny to justify applying its disclosure regime to issue advocacy organizations, like Petitioner, that engage in no express advocacy or its functional equivalent. 2. Whether applying New Mexico’s disclosure regime to an organization that does not meet Buckley’s “major purpose” test and does not engage in express advocacy, like Petitioner, constitutes narrow tailoring under exacting scrutiny absent donor earmarking. 3. Whether disclosure regimes applied to issue advocacy organizations, like Petitioner, that engage exclusively in political speech—without express advocacy or its functional equivalent—must satisfy strict scrutiny rather than exacting scrutiny.
2026
The Babylon Bee v. Bonta
Question Presented
Whether a California law that required large online platforms to police digitally created or modified political speech (so-called “deepfakes”) hosted on their platforms and remove them; label them as “materially deceptive content”; and provide a reporting mechanism to report content for removal or labeling, violates Section 230.
2026
E.D. v. Noblesville School District
Question Presented
Whether Hazelwood applies (1) whenever student speech might be erroneously attributed to the school, as the Fifth, Seventh, and Tenth Circuits have held; (2) when student speech occurs in the context of an “organized and structured educational activity,” as the Third Circuit has held; or (3) only when student speech is part of the “curriculum,” as the Sixth and Eleventh Circuits have held.
2025
The Buckeye Institute v. Internal Revenue Service
Question Presented
Whether exacting scrutiny governs a First Amendment challenge to 26 U.S.C. § 6033(b)(5)’s requirement that nonprofit organizations disclose their “substantial contributors.
2025
National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo
Question Presented
When it is obvious that a government official’s conduct violates the Constitution under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, is the violation clearly established for purposes of qualified immunity despite some factual distinctions that are irrelevant under the governing constitutional rule?
2025
First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc. v. Platkin
Question Presented
Whether, when the subject of a state investigatory demand has established a reasonably objective chill of its First Amendment rights, a federal court in a first-filed action is deprived of jurisdiction because those rights must be adjudicated in state court.
2025
Villarreal v. Alaniz
Question Presented
(1) Whether it obviously violates the First Amendment to arrest someone for asking government officials questions and publishing the information they volunteer; and (2) whether qualified immunity is unavailable to public officials who use a state statute in a way that obviously violates the First Amendment, or instead shields those officials.
2025
Center for Arizona Policy, Inc. v. Arizona Secretary of State
Question Presented
Whether Arizona’s Prop 211, which requires multi-layer donor disclosure for issue advocacy, violates the First Amendment.
2025
Chiles v. Salazar
Question Presented
Whether a law that censors certain conversations between counselors and their clients based on the viewpoints expressed regulates conduct or violates the Free Speech Clause.
2025
Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond
Question Presented
1. Whether the academic and pedagogical choices of a privately owned and run school constitute state action simply because it contracts with the state to offer a free educational option for interested students.
2. Whether a state violates the Free Exercise Clause by excluding privately run religious schools from the state’s charter-school program solely because the schools are religious, or whether a state can justify such an exclusion by invoking anti-establishment interests that go further than the Establishment Clause requires.
2025
First Choice v. Platkin
Question Presented
Where the subject of a state investigatory demand has established a reasonably objective chill of its First Amendment rights, is a federal court in a first-filed action deprived of jurisdiction because those rights must be adjudicated in state court.
Amicus Commentary
- All
Can calling an artist a “monopoly of one” displace the First Amendment?
Public accommodations laws “help ensure a free and open economy.” Traditionally, public accommodations laws have been applied to, well, public accommodations, such as hotels, or “what the old common law promised to any member of the public wanting a meal at the inn, that accepting the usual terms of service, they will not be turned…
New AFP Foundation brief seeks to close legal loophole banning religious schools from tuition assistance
Should a child’s opportunity for education turn on the religious perspective of the child? Should it turn on the religious perspective of the school? What if the school is just a little bit religious? Or too religious? Would that matter? It would if the child lives in an area of Maine with no public school.…
Cheerleading, social media, and free speech: What the Supreme Court’s decision in Mahanoy School District v. B.L. means for students’ First Amendment rights
One of the biggest student free speech cases in the last half century started with a high school cheerleader and a profanity-laced Snapchat. The implications of that terse, ephemeral message extend well beyond the original hundred-plus friends with whom the freshman student shared her post. In a decision today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1…
Kennedy v. Bremerton School District shows why a high school football coach’s prayer may be important for academic freedom
Government employs a veritable army of teachers, professors, graduate students, undergraduate work-study students, as well as coaches, teachers’ aides, tutors, and administrators. To what degree can government, as an employer, punish the people it hires for their own personal expression? That’s a live question. The First Amendment protects citizens from the government. The government doesn’t…