Mirabelli v. Bonta

Majority reasoning

The Court reasoned that parents who object on religious grounds are likely to succeed on their Free Exercise Clause claim because California's policies substantially interfere with parents' right to guide their children's religious upbringing — a burden the Court found even greater than the one it had already ruled sufficient to trigger the highest level of constitutional review (called "strict scrutiny," meaning the government must show its policy is narrowly tailored to a compelling interest) in last Term's Mahmoud v. Taylor. The Court found California's policies unlikely to survive that strict scrutiny because, while the State cited student safety and privacy as its goals, the policies exclude the very people — parents — who are typically the primary protectors of a child's wellbeing, and a less restrictive alternative exists: allowing religious exemptions while still protecting children from abusive parents. The Court also found parents likely to succeed on their due process claim, reasoning that long-established precedent gives parents — not the government — primary authority over their children's upbringing, including the right to participate in decisions about their children's mental health, and that concealing symptoms of gender dysphoria from parents while facilitating social transition at school likely violates that right. Finally, the Court held that being denied constitutional rights during a lengthy appeals process constitutes irreparable harm, and that the balance of equities favored parents because the injunction itself promotes child safety by ensuring fit parents have a role in consequential decisions, while still allowing the State to protect children from unfit or abusive parents through existing child-welfare laws.

Dissent reasoning

The dissent argued that the Court misused its emergency docket to rush a decision on novel, complex legal questions that deserve careful, deliberate consideration through normal judicial procedures — full briefing, oral argument, and conference deliberation. Justice Kagan wrote that the Court jumped ahead of the Ninth Circuit, which was already in the process of reconsidering the stay through its own en banc (full court) review, and that the Court could instead have granted review in a nearly identical pending case (Foote v. Ludlow School Committee) to decide these issues properly in the regular term. The dissent also raised a pointed concern about the Court's reliance on substantive due process — the legal doctrine that finds certain unenumerated (unwritten) rights in the Constitution's guarantee of "liberty" — noting that several members of the majority have previously expressed deep skepticism of or outright hostility to that very doctrine, making today's use of it to protect parental rights difficult to reconcile with the Court's recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which eliminated a different substantive due process right. The dissent stressed it was not saying the parents are necessarily wrong on the merits — indeed, it acknowledged that parents likely do have constitutional rights regarding their children's wellbeing, and that California's policy "could have crossed the constitutional line" — but insisted the Court should have used its ordinary processes to decide these difficult questions carefully rather than resolving them through a rushed emergency order that will be read by everyone as a final ruling.