Each year, legal commentators Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern review the Supreme Court's most problematic decisions — and their choice for 2025's most egregious comes as a surprise.
Writing in Slate, Lithwick declared the case NIH v. American Public Health Association as the year's worst ruling, citing it as emblematic of broader institutional dysfunction.
The case centered on the Trump administration's cancellation of thousands of National Institutes of Health research grants —including funding for suicide prevention, HIV transmission, Alzheimer's, and cardiovascular disease research. The administration justified the cancellations by citing concerns about DEI initiatives, "gender ideology" and COVID research.
"This Is the Nastiest Opinion by a Supreme Court Justice in 2025," the Slate article was titled.
"There were a lot of decisions in 2025 that immiserated huge amounts of people and made the world materially worse," Lithwick wrote.
"But my pick is not one of those. Instead, I need to talk about NIH v. American Public Health Association. Yes, it has to do with slashing research grants, which does materially harm a lot of people. But more profoundly for me, this case is emblematic of every single level of destruction and mayhem coming out of the Supreme Court — all the arrogance bundled into one."
U.S. District Judge William Young conducted a bench trial and issued a 103-page opinion requiring the NIH to restore the grants. A federal appeals court agreed. However, in an unsigned 5-4 shadow-docket order, the Supreme Court reversed this decision, claiming it contradicted a previous emergency ruling in Department of Education v. California.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized the approach, noting that "a half paragraph of reasoning (issued without full briefing or any oral argument) thus suffices here to partially sustain the government's abrupt cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to support life-saving biomedical research."
Most notably, Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Brett Kavanaugh, issued a sharply worded concurring opinion attacking Judge Young — a Reagan appointee with 47 years of judicial experience — for allegedly defying their previous order. Gorsuch stated that judges "are never free to defy" Supreme Court decisions, adding: "This is now the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case squarely controlled by one of its precedents."
The rebuke proved so pointed that Young subsequently apologized to both justices from the bench.
Lithwick also highlighted Justice Amy Coney Barrett's dismissal of Jackson in another decision as reflecting broader animosity among the justices. She emphasized the hostile working environment created by such exchanges and noted that lower-court judges face additional pressure, including death threats and impeachment threats from members of Congress.
"Right there, you have the perfect shadow-docket sandwich: perfunctory, bad decisionmaking, conclusory predictions about what constitutes an “emergency” and who’s going to win, decided in a couple of days, wiping out extensive factual findings," Lithwick wrote.
"And it’s rooted in a different shadow-docket order that, as Justice Elena Kagan said at the time, was “at the least under-developed, and very possibly wrong.”
