Between 1850 and 1870, Congress ceded millions of acres of public land in the West to railroads in a distinct checkerboard pattern of alternating public and private plats of land. The result of Congress’s peculiar land-grant scheme is that many parcels of public land in the checkerboard are landlocked and accessible only by “corner crossing’ —the act of moving diagonally from the corner of one public parcel to another, trespassing through the adjoining private property in the process.

Nearly fifty years ago, this Court unanimously rejected the government’s argument that Congress “implicitly reserved an easement to pass over the [privately-owned] sections in order to reach the [public] sections that were held by the Government” in the checkerboard. Leo Sheep Co. v. United States, 440 U.S. 668, 678 (1979). In Leo Sheep, that meant the government could not create public access to a Wyoming reservoir by clearing a dirt road that crossed two checkerboard corners—at least not without exercising the government’s power of eminent domain and paying just compensation.

In 2021, four hunters corner crossed through Iron Bar’s property to hunt on public land; Iron Bar sued for trespass. In the decision below, the Tenth Circuit recognized that, under Wyoming law, the hunters had trespassed on Iron Bar’s property. The court nonetheless held that an 1885 federal statute governing fences—the Unlawful Inclosures Act—implicitly preempted Wyoming law and “functionally” created a “limited easement” across privately-held checkerboard land.

The question presented is:

Whether the Unlawful Inclosures Act implicitly preempts private landowners’ state-law property right to exclude in an area covering millions of acres of land throughout the West.

(i)

Whether the patient privacy provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), 42 U.S.C. 88 1320d, et seq., and its regulations, protects against discovery of “individually identifiable health information” of non-parties to the pending litigation against a health care provider, where the information sought is at best tangentially relevant to the underlying claims of negligence against the provider, even though courts ostensibly have authority to direct disclosure of protected information that violates HIPAA?

In 2017, California enacted the Prohibition on Public Employers Deterring or Discouraging Union Membership (PEDD). The PEDD prohibits “public employer[s]” from “deter[ing] or discourag[ing]” public employees from unlonizing. Cal.Gov.Code § 3550.

Here, the California Court of Appeal rejected public employers’ First Amendment challenge to an administrative order finding them liable for factually true, noncoercive communications made by their employees and a nonprofit affiliate. The Court of Appeal relied entirely on the government-speech doctrine. The California Supreme Court refused to review.

The question presented is whether’ the government-speech doctrine authorizes states to, consistent with the First Amendment, categorically prohibit agents and employees of public employers acting within the actual or apparent agency of the public employer from sharing disfavored views?

1. Whether the Eleventh Circuit’s claim that a litigant has forfeited her appellate rights and its refusal to conduct the required de novo review on a motion to dismiss, not only violated Petitioner’s due process rights and denied her equal protection under the law, but also created a dangerous precedent which would allow lower courts to wholly disregard this Court’s established precedent and foreclose all further appellate review.

2. Whether this Court’s recent decision in Royal Canin U.S.A., Inc. v. Wullschleger, 604 U.S. 22 (2025), raises a new issue of whether Petitioner’s supplemental state law claims should have been dismissed without prejudice where the Eleventh Circuit did not revive the federal claims thereby making the state claims supplemental to nothing and where the District Court failed to conduct an independent analysis of the state law claims.

This is a death penalty case from Alabama in which the following occurred:

(1) the defense attorney was being paid in substantial part by the defendant’s father;

(2) the attorney learned before trial that the defendant had been abused as a child by his father—the same person paying the attorney;

(3) the defendant’s father told the attorney that he would be “done with helping with this case” if the attorney presented evidence of the abuse as mitigation at trial;

(4) the attorney never informed the defendant or the court of any conflict of interest and instead privately obtained a signed document from the defendant agreeing to forego any use of the abuse evidence;

(5) the attorney then called the father to testify at trial that the defendant was raised 1n a supportive home; and

(6) the trial court expressly relied on the father’s testimony that the defendant had a positive upbringing when imposing the death penalty.

The state appellate court held that the attorney did not have an actual

conflict of interest, and therefore the defendant was not denied his constitutional right to effective, conflict-free counsel. On habeas review, the Eleventh Circuit held that the state court’s decision was not unreasonable under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d). The question presented 1s this:

In the extraordinary circumstances of this death

penalty case, was 1t unreasonable for the state court

to conclude that the defense attorney did not have

an actual conflict of interest?

1

As part of an investigation into a scheme to disclose nonpublic Twitter account information to foreign ac- tors, San Francisco—based FBI agents visited Peti- tioner Ahmad Abouammo at his home in Seattle. While they were there, Mr. Abouammo went upstairs and emailed them an allegedly falsified document. Mr. Abouammo’s only interaction with the agents occurred in Seattle.

A grand jury in the Northern District of California indicted Mr. Abouammo for (among other things) fal- sifying documents with the intent to impede an inves- tigation. The parties then agreed to toll the statute of limitations for other uncharged offenses. On the day the tolling agreement expired, the government filed a superseding information adding various felony counts. Mr. Abouammo never waived prosecution by indict- ment. See Fed. R. Crim. P. 7(b). Four months after the limitations period had expired, the government dismissed this placeholder information and replaced it with a superseding indictment containing the same charges.

The questions presented are:

1. Whether venue is proper in a district where no offense conduct took place, so long as the statute’s i1n- tent element “contemplates” effects that could occur there.

2. Whether a criminal information unaccompanied by a waiver of indictment is an “information charging a felony” that allows the government to unilaterally extend the statute of limitations under 18 U.S.C. § 8288.

(1)

Petitioner David Robinson Jr. was convicted under 26 U.S.C. §§5861(d), 5871, and 5841—sections of the National Firearms Act that impose criminal penalties of up to 10 years’ imprisonment for possessing a short- barreled rifle not registered by the transferor of the rifle. As the transferee, Robinson was not responsible for paying the $200 fee required to register the rifle. The constitutional foundation justifying the federal criminalization of his conduct is Congress’s power to tax under Article I, section 8, clause 1 of the Constitu- tion.

The important federal questions presented are:

1. Whether federal criminal punishment of the possession of an unregistered short-barreled rifle vio- lates the Second Amendment.

2. Whether federal criminal punishment of the possession of an unregistered short-barreled rifle ex- ceeds Congress’s power to tax under Article I, section 8, clause 1 of the Constitution and violates the Tenth Amendment.

In Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279, 296 (1991), the Court recognized that a “confession is like no other evidence.” The Court thus held that a reviewing court must “exercise extreme caution before determining that the admission of a confession at trial was harmless.” Jd. (emphasis added).

Decades after Fulminante, the Ninth Circuit faithfully followed the Court’s “extreme caution” admonition in its own precedent. See, e.g., Jones v. Harrington, 829 F.3d 1128, 1142 (9th Cir. 2016); Garcia v. Long, 808 F.8d 771, 784 (9th Cir. 2015) (quoting Fulminante and explaining that the Court must use “extreme caution” in a harmlessness analysis); Martinez v. Cate, 903 F.3d 982, 999 (9th Cir. 2018) (Same).

Despite its consistent invocation of Fulminante’s “extreme caution” rule, the Ninth Circuit application of fulminante’s edict is not harmonious. In Mr. Ruiz- Rivera’s case and others, the Ninth Circuit is haphazardly applying Fulminante, or ignoring its language altogether. Accordingly, the question presented 1s:

Whether courts should follow the direction of Fulminante and use “extreme caution” before finding the admission of a confession 1s harmless error.

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