AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The Supreme Court opens a new term tomorrow with a blockbuster case focused on climate change. The justices will also consider bans on AR-15 rifles, test of President Trump's power on immigration and whether religious schools are exempt from anti-discrimination laws. NPR's Carrie Johnson has been studying up on some of the big cases, and she's here now to tell us more. Hi, Carrie.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Hi there.
RASCOE: So you'll be at the court tomorrow. What will you be watching for?
JOHNSON: This first case is a big one. It's about a lawsuit Boulder, Colorado, filed against Suncor and ExxonMobil over the local costs of climate change. Boulder says these companies knew their products would cause harm, and they deceived the public about that for decades, raising the risks of wildfire, flood and extreme heat. Corey Riday-White is legal director at the Center for Climate Integrity, which supports this lawsuit.
COREY RIDAY-WHITE: More so than it being a climate case or an environmental case, this is a case about corporate accountability. It's about what we believe, as a society, we should expect from corporations.
JOHNSON: Now, there are a lot of other lawsuits around the country involving big oil companies. So what the justices do here could have repercussions. Now, Suncor and Exxon say climate change is way too big an issue for states to be able to take it on one by one. They say the federal government should be in charge and that all of these cases in state courts should be stopped in their tracks.
RASCOE: The Supreme Court is also going to venture into the Second Amendment again this term with this case about those popular assault-style rifles. Tell us more about that.
JOHNSON: This is a case challenging the bans on AR-15s in places like Cook County, Illinois, and Connecticut. Connecticut banned that weapon after it was used in the massacre of children and teachers at that Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. But the AR-15 is legal in most states. This could, in part, be a fight about history because the way the Supreme Court evaluates Second Amendment cases looks to the country's historical tradition.
Now, the people supporting these weapons say they're in common use, that more than 10 million Americans own them, and that means you cannot ban them. But Chicago and Connecticut say these rifles are unusually dangerous, that they're used in a lot of mass shootings. The argument's going to come up in a couple of months in early December.
RASCOE: One of the hallmarks of the court in recent years has been its approach to cases involving religion. Is there a new case that stands out to you on that issue?
JOHNSON: Yeah. It's another case out of Colorado. It's called St. Mary's Catholic Parish v. Roy. Colorado has a universal preschool program that gives parents money to use at the school of their choice. Participating schools need to pledge to give kids an equal opportunity to enroll, no matter their race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. And that clashes with teachings of the Catholic Church on LGBTQ issues.
So the question here is whether the Free Exercise of Religion Clause (ph) requires Colorado to make an exception for these Catholic schools. The conservative justices on the court have really been siding with religious groups for years now, and six of the current justices on the court are Catholic.
RASCOE: We all know that immigration is at the center of President Trump's political agenda, and a lot of those cases make their way to the Supreme Court. Can you explain the key immigration case coming up?
JOHNSON: Yeah. Just this week on the emergency docket, the justices have allowed President Trump to restart deportations of immigrants to places where those people had no prior ties, and those are called third-country deportations. Lower courts said that violated these immigrants' due process rights and didn't give them enough time to raise concerns about torture or persecution.
But the Supreme Court's conservative majority has, for now, let the Trump administration fast track those deportations. The justices are going to hear broader arguments about that policy in December, and they've also accepted yet another immigration case about President Trump's effort to deny people bond hearings, even if they've been in the country for a long time.
RASCOE: Well, all of that sounds like a pretty full plate. Is there anything else on your radar?
JOHNSON: There's one more that caught my eye. It involves a pilot in Alaska who had his plane seized because one of his passengers tried to bring cases of beer on the plane to a place that's a dry village because of problems with alcohol there. The pilot says taking his plane away was an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment. And they also have time to add even more cases. So I'll be watching for that too.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Carrie Johnson. Thank you so much.
JOHNSON: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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