Elena Kagan

Rule Changes

Wrote the unanimous opinion

For three decades, a legal rule called the Heck bar let cities enforce questionable speech ordinances with near-impunity: once someone was convicted under such a law, they effectively lost the ability to challenge it in federal court. On March 20, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that this shield doesn't apply when the person is simply asking a court to stop future enforcement — not to undo a past conviction.

Updated Mar 20

Rule Changes

Authored the majority opinion in GEO Group v. Menocal

For more than a decade, private prison operator GEO Group has fought to avoid a trial over allegations that roughly 60,000 immigration detainees at its Aurora, Colorado facility were forced to perform janitorial work for one dollar a day — or nothing at all — under threat of solitary confinement. On February 25, the United States Supreme Court shut down GEO's last procedural escape route, ruling 9-0 that the company cannot claim government-contractor immunity to skip ahead of a final verdict. Justice Elena Kagan wrote that GEO "must wait" for trial before appealing.

Updated Feb 26

Rule Changes

Leading liberal critic of the Court’s use of the shadow docket to expand presidential removal power

In 2025, President Donald Trump launched an aggressive campaign to assert sweeping authority over independent federal agencies, testing the long‑standing 1935 Supreme Court precedent in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that limited presidential power to fire members of multi‑member regulatory commissions. After the Supreme Court used its emergency docket to let Trump remove Democratic members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the conflict escalated when Trump fired Democratic Federal Trade Commission commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter in March 2025 and later attempted to oust Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, both before their fixed terms expired.

Updated Dec 11, 2025