In both cases, some of the most conservative justices signaled frustration with the court’s cautious approach to divisive issues.
The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a transgender youth’s victory in a case on access to high school bathrooms and revived a lawsuit from the parents of a man who had died in police custody. Both moves drew opposition from some of the court’s most conservative members. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they would have heard the transgender case, and they, along with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, said the court had bowed to fear of public criticism in the case on police violence. The court’s default mode this term has often appeared to be caution, frustrating conservatives on and off the court who had hoped its six-justice majority of Republican appointees would act more boldly. The case on transgender rights appeared to close the book on a long-running lawsuit that started in 2015, when Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy who was a student at Gloucester High School in southeastern Virginia, sued the local school board over a policy that required students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms for their “corresponding biological genders.” A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled last year that the school board’s policy violated the Constitution and a federal law. “The proudest moments of the federal judiciary have been when we affirm the burgeoning values of our bright youth, rather than preserve the prejudices of the past,” Judge Henry F. Floyd wrote for the majority. “How shallow a promise of equal protection that would not protect Grimm from the fantastical fears and unfounded prejudices of his adult community.” The Supreme Court had agreed to hear an earlier appeal in the case but dismissed it in 2017 after the Trump administration changed the federal government’s position on transgender rights. The Biden administration has since adopted policies protecting transgender students. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of transgender rights for the first time, saying that a federal employment discrimination law applied to L.
