By the end of June, the Supreme Court is expected to issue decisions in two closely watched cases involving transgender athletes. While much of the public conversation has focused on sports participation, the legal questions before the Court extend much further, touching on constitutional protections, Title IX, and the future of how transgender people are treated under the law.

In this week's story, Alejandra Caraballo argues that these cases should be understood not as isolated disputes, but as the latest result of a decades-long conservative effort to reshape the federal judiciary. She traces the political and institutional forces that helped create today’s courts and makes the case that meaningful progress on civil rights will require confronting the structure of the judiciary itself. The stakes, she argues, are not only what the Court decides this term, but what kind of legal system will shape rights and protections for generations to come.

The Supreme Court's pending transgender rights decisions may be years in the making—but the forces behind them have been building for decades. Long before today's battles over healthcare, sports, and public accommodations, conservative legal activists were investing in a strategy to reshape the courts themselves. The result is a judiciary increasingly positioned to determine the scope of civil rights for generations to come. As new rulings loom, a larger story comes into focus: how the federal judiciary became a central arena for political power, and why growing calls for court reform are emerging alongside the fight for transgender equality.

Read the full feature here.

The pending decisions in BPJ will most certainly entrench Skrimetti’s rational basis framework, which would leave every anti-trans law in the country subject to the weakest form of constitutional review. Researching this piece confirmed to me that this outcome was engineered into existence by a vast conservative legal movement. The through line runs from the 1971 Powell memo to the establishment of the Federalist Society, and the $1.6 billion Leonard Leo has spent reshaping the judiciary. The doctrine naturally flows from who is sitting on the bench, not the merits of the arguments themselves. Hungary is a good counterexample where, once Orban lost power, EU court decisions became enforceable again allowing for LGBTQ legal groups to gain background. It demonstrated that rights didn’t return because of better arguments but because a different forum emerged and was allowed to enforce its decisions. In the United States, the lesson should be the same. We need court expansion, term limits, and structural reform of the courts. They are a vital precondition for civil rights litigation to function. -

— Alejandra Caraballo

Under Trump, federal immigration powers have accelerated into aggressive raids, swelling detention populations, weakened oversight, and a federal enforcement apparatus that critics increasingly describe as authoritarian. But advocates and legal experts argue this system is not inevitable. Next week, we examine what it would actually take to rein in ICE.