When Supreme Court justices announce their opinions in court, the decision’s author summarizes the ruling from the bench. In rare cases, a dissenting justice will dissent from the bench to call attention to an issue.

That happened Tuesday, when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in Chiles v. Salazar, a case in which the court sided with Christian counselor Kaley Chiles in her First Amendment challenge to the state’s ban on so-called conversion therapy for minors.

(The court doesn’t broadcast these opinion announcements, even though it has the ability to do so, and does in fact broadcast the oral arguments that take place in the same courtroom. Right after Tuesday’s announcement in the Chiles case, the court livestreamed the audio for another case being argued before the justices. When that case, Pitchford v. Cain, is decided in open court later this term, the announcement won’t be streamed.)

In her dissent, the Biden appointee wrote that the practice of seeking to “convert” a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity has been “widely discredited within the medical and scientific community” and found to cause “lasting psychological harm.”

Departing from Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion for eight members of the court, Jackson wrote, “The conclusion that a State can regulate the provision of medical care even if, in so doing, it incidentally restricts the speech of some providers, fully comports with the First Amendment’s animating principles.”

She continued:“Ultimately, because the majority plays with fire in this case, I fear that the people of this country will get burned.”
Until now, she wrote, licensed medical professionals couldn’t do or say whatever they wanted. States could regulate them, which, she wrote, contributed to the high quality of American care.

“Today, the Court turns its back on that tradition,” Jackson wrote. “And, to be completely frank, no one knows what will happen now.” She accused the majority of reaching this “momentous decision” without “adequately grappling with the potential long-term and disastrous implications of this ruling.”

The justice closed her solo dissent by worrying about the majority having opened a “dangerous can of worms” that “threatens to impair States’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect,” pushes the Constitution “into uncharted territory in an utterly irrational fashion” and “risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.”

Though Jackson and some combination of the court’s other two Democratic appointees have joined together in other disputes as recently as Monday, her Chiles dissent is only the latest example of her going it alone when she feels it warranted.

After Tuesday’s hearing in the Pitchford case, which deals with race and jury discrimination, the justices will be back on the bench Wednesday to hear arguments in the birthright citizenship case, in an appeal that could put the three Democratic appointees together again, as they were in a previous chapter of the citizenship litigation last term.

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