The blockbusters everyone is waiting for — the challenge to the administration's effort to curtail birthright citizenship chief among them — are still locked in chambers. But on Thursday, May 21, the Supreme Court handed down three decisions that, taken together, say a fair amount about where the justices are this term. One revived a long-dormant Cold War statute against the cruise industry. One quietly spared a man's life while four justices fumed. And one rewrote, in plain and unanimous terms, how much it costs a company to walk away from a union pension plan.
Here is what happened, and why each one matters.
Cuba: a 1996 law gets new teeth
In Havana Docks Corp. v. Royal Caribbean Cruises, the Court ruled 8-1 in favor of a U.S. company whose port facilities at the Port of Havana were seized by Fidel Castro's government in 1959. Havana Docks had sued four cruise giants — Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian, and MSC — under the Helms-Burton Act, the 1996 law that lets Americans collect damages from anyone who "traffics" in property Cuba confiscated after the revolution. The cruise lines had used the docks for voyages years later, and Havana Docks won a combined $440 million before the 11th Circuit threw the judgment out.
The appeals court's reasoning was that Havana Docks' original right to the property had been time-limited and expired in 2004, well before the cruises. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas disagreed — bluntly, in those words. The statute, he held, makes anyone who uses property tainted by a past confiscation liable to the American who owns a claim to it, full stop; the company did not have to prove its expired interest would have been renewed. Justice Elena Kagan, the lone dissenter, argued the majority had misread the text and that the decision lets plaintiffs recover for trafficking in property that, by then, was not theirs. (Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wrote separately to concur.)
What gives the ruling its charge is the timing. It arrived one day after the Justice Department indicted Raúl Castro — Fidel's brother and successor — over the 1996 shootdown of two civilian planes that killed four people, the very atrocity that pushed Congress to pass Helms-Burton in the first place. With the Trump administration ratcheting up pressure on Havana, a statute that sat largely unused for two decades suddenly has sharp practical consequences, and the cruise industry is first in line.
The death penalty: a one-sentence order, sixty-three pages of disagreement
The second decision is the strangest, because the Court technically decided nothing at all.
In Hamm v. Smith, Alabama had asked the justices to clarify how courts should weigh multiple, conflicting IQ scores when deciding whether a death-row prisoner is intellectually disabled — and therefore, under the Court's 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, constitutionally ineligible for execution. Joseph Clifton Smith, convicted in the 1997 killing of Durk Van Dam, has taken five IQ tests; four placed him in the low-to-mid 70s, near the threshold, and the 11th Circuit had found him intellectually disabled after weighing the scores alongside other evidence.
Rather than answer the question, the Court issued a single unsigned line dismissing Alabama's appeal as "improvidently granted" — a DIG, in the trade — which leaves the lower ruling intact and spares Smith's life. The vote was effectively 5-4: the three liberal justices, joined by Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, formed the majority to walk away. Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, concurred, explaining that the case was a poor vehicle: the methods for assessing multiple IQ scores raise questions even experts can't agree on, and the Court was not equipped to settle them here.
The dissents are where the stakes show. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a 24-page opinion — joined in full by Thomas and in part by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch — arguing the Court had shirked its duty and left lower courts in confusion. Thomas went further in a separate 16-page dissent, calling for Atkins itself to be overruled, and characterizing the dismissal as the Court rewarding Smith for persuading judges he was not intelligent enough to be executed. That a sitting justice would scrap the bar on executing the intellectually disabled is the real news buried inside a one-sentence order — and the reason six justices spent some sixty-three pages arguing over a case the Court declined to resolve.
Pensions: a quiet, unanimous, expensive ruling
The day's third decision drew no fireworks and may touch the most wallets. In M&K Employee Solutions v. Trustees of the IAM National Pension Fund, a unanimous Court, in an opinion by Justice Jackson, sided with the trustees of a multiemployer pension plan covering unionized machinists and aerospace workers.
The dispute sounds technical and is, but the consequence is not. When an employer leaves an underfunded union pension plan, it owes "withdrawal liability" — its share of the plan's shortfall — measured as of a fixed date the year before. The question was whether the plan's actuary may use updated economic assumptions adopted after that measurement date to calculate the bill. The Court said yes: the law sets no deadline for choosing those assumptions, so actuaries can use the most current data available. The practical effect is steep. Because of a change in the discount rate, the lead employer's tab came out several times higher — roughly $6 million instead of under $2 million — than it would have under the older numbers. It is a clean win for pension plans and the workers they cover, and a costly surprise for companies trying to exit them.
The thread
Two of Thursday's three rulings turned on the same move: reading a federal statute for exactly what its text says and no more — Thomas on Helms-Burton, Jackson on ERISA — even when that produces uncomfortable results for cruise lines or departing employers. The third turned on the opposite instinct: a majority deciding that some questions are better left unanswered for now, however loudly the dissenters object.
None of these is the decision that will define the term. Those are still coming. But Thursday was a reminder that the Court does much of its consequential work in the cases that never make the front page — and that sometimes the most revealing thing the justices do is decline to decide.
