The U.S. Supreme Court turned down a chance to change its previous decision that allowed buffer zones around abortion clinics, even though two of the court’s most conservative members were against it.
The court said in two orders released Monday that it would not hear challenges to laws in Carbondale, Ill., and Englewood, N.J., that stop anti-abortion activists from “sidewalk counseling” people who are going to an abortion clinic.
Both Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have taken up the case, but it needed the votes of four justices to be carried out, The Hill reported.
Based on the Supreme Court’s decision in Hill v. Colorado in 2000, lower courts upheld the ordinances in both cities. That decision said that a similar law in Colorado did not violate the First Amendment.
Since then, groups against abortion have tried to destroy the precedent. Some conservative justices recently said that the decision was an abuse of free speech, including in the Supreme Court’s opinion overturning constitutional protections for abortion. This gave them more hope.
“Hill has been seriously undermined, if not completely eroded, and our refusal to provide clarity is an abdication of our judicial duty,” Thomas wrote.
“Hill was wrong the day it was decided, and the case for overruling it has only strengthened ever since,” Paul Clement, a veteran conservative Supreme Court attorney who previously served as solicitor general, wrote in the petition challenging Carbondale’s ordinance.
Coalition Life is an anti-abortion group that does “sidewalk counseling” in places like Carbondale. Clement worked for them. To get rid of the 24-year-old rule, the group asked for help from 15 Republican state attorneys general, Alliance Defending Freedom, and other anti-abortion groups.
As it asked the court to reject Coalition Life’s appeal, the city pointed out that its law had been thrown out.
“Petitioner wants to fast-track a request that this Court overturn Hill just as it overturned Roe v. Wade. This Court should deny that request. This case is a far cry from an ideal—or even passable—vehicle for revisiting Hill,” Neal Katyal, another veteran Supreme Court advocate, who served as acting solicitor general under former President Barack Obama, wrote on behalf of the city.
In Englewood, resident Jeryl Turco fought against a similar law that the city passed in 2014 to create a buffer zone around an abortion clinic because of violent protesters from a group called Bread of Life.
Turco is not part of the group and said the ordinance violated her First Amendment rights to work as a sidewalk counselor in a way that was not allowed.
Jay Sekulow, who is the lead counsel at the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, was her lawyer. Sekulow was one of President Trump’s lawyers in his first trial for impeachment.
Englewood urged the court to turn away the case, saying it “is extremely fact-sensitive and involves material credibility issues that the District Court has resolved. Also, the facts of this case are unique because of Petitioner’s method of sidewalk counseling.”
In a separate case, the nation’s highest court declined to hear a challenge by civil and voting rights groups seeking to overturn Pennsylvania’s requirement that mail-in ballots include a handwritten date on the outer envelope.
The groups argued that the mandate is unnecessary and has led to the disqualification of valid ballots.
The justices refused to review a lower court ruling that upheld the requirement, rejecting the claim that it violated federal law, which prohibits discarding ballots for paperwork errors that are “not material” to determining a voter’s eligibility.
In 2024, the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that while the date requirement “serves little apparent purpose”—as it is not used to verify if a ballot was received on time—it remains lawful.
The court reasoned that the 1964 Civil Rights Act applies to voter registration rules determining eligibility to vote, not to how a ballot must be submitted to be counted.