UCLA constitutional law experts review the Supreme Court’s most recent term

The U.S. Supreme Court's recent decisions on abortion and reproductive rights, presidential immunity, free speech, racial gerrymandering, gun rights and other topics were the focus of a panel discussion co-presented by the UCLA School of Law Safeguarding American Democracy Project at the Hammer Museum.

"Under the Gavel: The U.S. Supreme Court's Most Recent Term in Review" brought together UCLA constitutional and election law experts and their colleagues from other universities on July 10 for insight into the potentially wide-reaching implications of for American society. The event was moderated by Rick Hasen, director of the project and a professor of law and political science at UCLA.

Cary Franklin, faculty director of the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy, reflected on the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and the shadow it cast over abortion cases that made it to the highest court this year. One of them is FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, in which anti-abortion advocates are challenging the FDA's approval of mifepristone, the most widely used abortion drug. In June, the court reversed and remanded the case back to the lower courts, leaving the legality of mifepristone in limbo.

"That's probably the biggest issue on the horizon - will the Supreme Court issue a ruling that severely limits the use of medication abortion in this country?" said Franklin, who is UCLA's McDonald/Wright Professor of Law and director of the Williams Institute. "And that will affect everyone in California, and in every state. But you're going to have to stay tuned."

On the subject of free speech, Hasen turned to Eugene Volokh, the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law, for a discussion of the court's rulings on social media content. Platforms for speech land on a spectrum between places like newspapers on one end and the telephone systems on the other end - analogies that the court has deemed important for their future rulings on sensitive online content. Although the Court decided to apply First Amendment rights to curated social media feeds in the case of NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton, future rulings will have to decide other corners of free speech, such as artificial intelligence and uncurated feeds.

"It's left to the lower courts to decide," Volokh said. "So it may be many years before we figure out whether a platform has the right to just kick off your page altogether, or has the right to decide which direct messages it'll deliver and which ones it won't."

The experts were also joined by Kimberly West-Faulcon, law professor from Loyola Marymount University, who discussed the constitutionality of potential gun restrictions in United States v. Rahimi, as well as Justin Levitt, also from LMU but with a visiting appointment at UCLA, who examined the Trump v. United States immunity ruling and its unprecedented protection of the executive branch.

You can watch the full "Under the Gavel: The U.S. Supreme Court's Term in Review" panel below:

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