In a dispute about the pressure that organized labor can exert during a strike, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday against unionized drivers who walked off the job with their trucks full of wet concrete.

The decision united liberal and conservative justices in labor’s latest loss at the high court. The lone dissenter in the case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the ruling would hinder the development of labor law and “erode the right to strike.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, said the union failed to take reasonable precautions to protect the company’s concrete when the drivers went on strike. Barrett wrote that the drivers for Washington state-based Glacier Northwest quit work suddenly, putting the company’s property in “foreseeable and imminent danger.”

“The Union’s actions not only resulted in the destruction of all the concrete Glacier had prepared that day; they also posed a risk of foreseeable, aggravated, and imminent harm to Glacier’s trucks,” Barrett wrote in a decision joined by four other justices. Three more justices agreed with the outcome in the case but did not join Barrett’s opinion.

In 2018, the court’s conservative majority overturned a decades-old pro-union decision involving fees paid by government workers. More recently, the justices rejected a California regulation giving unions access to farm property so they could organize workers.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a separate opinion in the Washington state case that the federal National Labor Relations Act protects the right to strike, but with limits. He said it “does not protect striking employees who engage in the type of conduct alleged here.”

In her dissent, Jackson wrote: “Workers are not indentured servants, bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their master.”

This case stemmed from contract negotiations in 2017 between Glacier Northwest and the local Teamsters union, representing the drivers. When negotiations broke down, the union called for a strike. Drivers walked off the job while their trucks were full of concrete, which must be used quickly and can damage the trucks if it’s not.

Glacier says the union timed the strike to create chaos and inflict damage. Glacier not only had to dump the concrete but also pay for the wasted concrete to be broken up and hauled away.

The company sued the union in state court for intentionally damaging its property; the lawsuit was initially dismissed.

The question for the Supreme Court was about how the case should proceed. Glacier said its lawsuit in state court should not have been dismissed at the outset. The union said Glacier’s lawsuit should only be allowed to go forward in state court if the federal National Labor Relations Board first found that the union’s actions were not protected by federal law.

The U.S. Supreme Court has stripped federal agencies of authority over millions of acres of wetlands, weakening a bedrock environmental law enacted a half-century ago to cleanse the country’s badly polluted waters.

A 5-4 majority significantly expanded the ability of farmers, homebuilders and other developers to dig up or fill wetlands near rivers, lakes and streams, finding the government had long overreached in limiting such activities.

The ruling Thursday may nullify key parts of a rule the Biden administration imposed in December, which two federal judges already had blocked from being enforced in 26 states. It’s the latest turn in a decades-old struggle by courts and regulators to determine which waters are subject to protection under the Clean Water Act.

Some experts say the battle over wetlands now may shift to states, with red and blue states writing laws that take dramatically different approaches.

The high court’s decision follows one in 2022 curtailing federal power to reduce carbon emissions from power plants and indicates a willingness by the court’s emboldened conservatives to limit environmental laws and agency powers.

“This is one of the saddest chapters in the 50-year history of the Clean Water Act,” said Jim Murphy, an attorney with the National Wildlife Federation.

The Supreme Court on Thursday made it harder for the federal government to police water pollution in a decision that strips protections from wetlands that are isolated from larger bodies of water.


By a 5-4 vote, the court said in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that wetlands can only be regulated under the Clean Water Act if they have a “continuous surface connection” to larger, regulated bodies of water. There is no such connection on the Sacketts’ property.

The Supreme Court said Wednesday that Illinois can, for now, keep in place a new law that bars the sale of certain semi-automatic guns and large-capacity magazines.

The high court denied an emergency request from people challenging the law, which bans so-called assault weapons. The law’s opponents had asked the court to put the law on hold while a court challenge continues. The court did not comment and no justice publicly dissented.

The high court’s action comes at a time when gun violence has been heavily in the news. Since the beginning of the year, 115 people have died in 22 mass killings — an average of one mass killing a week, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in a partnership with Northeastern University. The database counts killings involving four or more fatalities, not including the perpetrator. Just recently, on May 6, a man armed with an AR-15 style rifle and other firearms fatally shot eight people, including three children, at a Dallas-area mall.

The case before the Supreme Court involves an Illinois state law enacted in January. The legislation bans the sale of a series of guns including the AR-15 and AK-47. The law also bars the sale of magazines that have more than 15 rounds of ammunition for handguns and more than 10 rounds of ammunition for a long gun.

People who legally owned the now-barred guns and magazines ahead of the law’s enactment can continue to keep them. The guns, however, must be registered with law enforcement.

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to a California animal cruelty law that affects the pork industry, ruling that the case was properly dismissed by lower courts. Pork producers had said that the law could force industry-wide changes and raise the cost of bacon and other pork products nationwide.

California’s law requires more space for breeding pigs, and producers say it would force the $26 billion-a-year industry to change its practices even though pork is produced almost entirely outside California.

The justices upheld lower court rulings dismissing the pork producers’ case.

During arguments in the case in October, liberal and conservative justices underscored the potential reach of the case. Some worried whether greenlighting the animal cruelty law would give state legislators a license to pass laws targeting practices they disapprove of, such as a law that says a product cannot be sold in the state if workers who made it are not vaccinated or are not in the country legally. They also worried about the reverse: How many state laws would be called into question if California’s law were not permitted?

California’s law requires more space for breeding pigs, and producers say it would force the $26 billion-a-year industry to change its practices even though pork is produced almost entirely outside California.

The justices upheld lower court rulings dismissing the pork producers’ case.

During arguments in the case in October, liberal and conservative justices underscored the potential reach of the case. Some worried whether greenlighting the animal cruelty law would give state legislators a license to pass laws targeting practices they disapprove of, such as a law that says a product cannot be sold in the state if workers who made it are not vaccinated or are not in the country legally. They also worried about the reverse: How many state laws would be called into question if California’s law were not permitted?

The case before the court involved California’s Proposition 12, which voters passed in 2018. It said that pork sold in the state needs to come from pigs whose mothers were raised with at least 24 square feet of space, with the ability to lie down and turn around. That rules out confined “gestation crates,” metal enclosures that are common in the pork industry.

The Iowa-based National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation sued. They said that while Californians consume 13% of the pork eaten in the United States, nearly 100% of it comes from hogs raised outside the state, mostly in the Midwest and North Carolina. The vast majority of sows, meanwhile, are not raised under conditions that would meet Proposition 12′s standards.

A wide-ranging selection of papers that belonged to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is opening to researchers Tuesday at the Library of Congress, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the justices’ deliberations in important cases including Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that essentially decided the presidential election.

Stevens, who died in 2019, served on the Supreme Court for nearly 35 years. In that time, the court decided cases on issues including abortion, affirmative action, presidential power, gun rights and the rights of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center. The papers being made public contain Stevens’ notes from the justices’ private conferences about cases, drafts of opinions and communications between the justices.

The collection’s opening comes as the current court has recently ruled or is weighing some of the same major issues. Last year, the court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade, giving states the ability to ban abortion after nearly 50 years. Now, the justices are deciding whether to do away with affirmative action, which has been upheld under Supreme Court decisions reaching back to 1978. An affirmative action decision is expected before the end of June, when the court traditionally finishes its work before taking a summer break.

Stevens was appointed to the court in 1975 by Republican President Gerald Ford and at first was considered a centrist, but he came to be seen as the court’s leading liberal. Stevens said that he hadn’t changed but that the court had grown more conservative around him. He did change his views on some issues, however. He morphed from a critic of affirmative action to a supporter, and he came to believe the death penalty is wrong.

The court has only become more conservative since Stevens’ departure. Six of the court’s nine members are conservatives, and the other three are liberals.

In Bush v. Gore, the case that ended Florida’s presidential recount and sent Republican George W. Bush to the White House over Democrat Al Gore, Stevens wrote a scathing dissent.

The Supreme Court on Friday preserved women’s access to a drug used in the most common method of abortion, rejecting lower-court restrictions while a lawsuit continues.

The justices granted emergency requests from the Biden administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, maker of the drug mifepristone. They are appealing a lower court ruling that would roll back Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone.

The drug has been approved for use in the U.S. since 2000 and more than 5 million people have used it. Mifepristone is used in combination with a second drug, misoprostol, in more than half of all abortions in the U.S.

The court’s action Friday almost certainly will leave access to mifepristone unchanged at least into next year, as appeals play out, including a potential appeal to the high court. The next stop for the case is at the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which has set arguments in the case for May 17.

Two of the nine justices — Samuel Alito, the author of last year’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and Clarence Thomas — voted to allow restrictions to take effect, and Alito issued a four-page dissent. No other justices commented on the court’s one-paragraph order, and the court did not release a full vote breakdown.