https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinion...-1618_hfci.pdf

SCOTUS effectively bans workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

This is a huge ruling for two reasons:
1. It's a 6-3 decision with Roberts and Gorusch in the majority
2. The rationale is sweeping: you can't analyze sexual orientation without involving "sex." That rationale trivially applies LGBTQ issues in pretty much everything else.

The ruling is so big maybe it deserves its own thread if someone can be bothered to make a better OP.

Wow! That is unexpected and welcome for you guys. Gorsuch is a bit of a wildcard huh? Wonder how long it will be before trump starts attacking him on twitter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/u...eme-court.html

From the decision:

In other words, the court is saying that refusing to hire someone for being gay, or transgender, necessarily involves sex. In the sense that the person's sex is inextricably linked to the reason for discrimination. The employer doesn't discriminate against all people that are sexually attracted to men, or who identify as women, but only males with those characteristics (and vice versa). That is discrimination on the basis of sex.

This ruling highlights why it is difficult to predict how justices will rule on specific cases once they are on the Supreme Court.

At this point, it certainly appears that Alito and Thomas are the most conservative justices. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch probably will vote with the Alito and Thomas most of the time, but not all the time. Going forward, Roberts probably will be the closest thing to a swing vote that the court has. Roberts obviously is not David Souter -- that is, a liberal justice who was hiding in plain sight as a conservative. He's a beltway conservative. But he is not an ideologue. If forced to choose between overturning precedent or maintaining what he sees as the court's reputation and moral authority, he generally will opt for the latter. That's why I would be shocked to see him ever vote to directly overturn Roe v. Wade.

I would not be at all surprised to see Gorsuch drift more in the direction of Roberts over time.

The next presidential election is going to be critical. Ginsberg is extremely unlikely to live another four years, and Thomas is threat to retire for his own reasons at any time. (As an aside, if a Democrat were elected president, I don't think it would affect Thomas's retirement decision at all.)

JV turning in his P&S grave. RIP

Is that true or is this a case where Gorsuch's legal philosophy runs orthogonal to his political views?

I obviously can't know for sure what his political views are, so it's hard to answer this question.

I would guess that no justice's legal philosophy is entirely orthogonal to his or her political views. But at the same time, it's surely too cynical to assume that every justice is working backwards in every case from a politically motivated conclusion to reasoning that purports to support the conclusion.

Probably the best way to conceive of this question is as follows: In a justice's formative years, the justice's intellectual attraction to one legal philosophy or another is heavily influenced by his or her political views. For example, it probably would be fair to assume that one reason Scalia was intellectually attracted to textualism was because he knew the results that approach would produce in most cases, and those results were a happy alignment with his politics.

But after a justice decides on a legal philosophy, that justice applies that legal philosophy with less regard for the politics of a particular case. This is another way of saying that the justices care about politics, but they also care about the internal consistency of their approach from one case to another.

I think OrP just means that we could perhaps have predicted his ruling based on what he's previously stated about his legal philosophy (re: textualism?)

I don't know enough to know if that's true or not. Seems like in this case one also might have predicted some tension between textualism and originalism?

Yeah, I'm not familiar enough with Gorsuch's jurisprudence to have an opinion, but I see David French and a few other conservatives say this decision is consistent with how he views the law and so wondered if this was as unpredictable as the underlying politics might suggest.

I think it probably is consistent with his view of the law. I should have been more precise and said that it is tough to predict outcomes based solely on assumptions, even correct assumptions, about the justices' politics. Supreme Court practicioners would confirm that not every politically conservative justice will land on the conservative side of every case that addresses a social issue. And they would say the same of politically liberal justices. The judges are not apolitical, but it's more complicated than that.

Based on this decision why even have the case before the supreme court on LGQBT2S adoption? It should be consistent with this verdict as well