The Supreme Court returned from its winter recess today with just one new grant from last week’s private conference, but the newest addition to the court’s merits docket is a significant one. Next term the justices will hear oral argument in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a challenge by several foster parents and Catholic Social Services to the city’s policy of cutting off referrals of foster children to CSS for placement because the agency would not certify same-sex couples as foster parents.

After they lost in the lower courts, the challengers went to the Supreme Court, where they asked the justices to weigh in on three questions: what kind of showing plaintiffs must make to succeed on this kind of religious discrimination claim; whether the Supreme Court should reconsider its 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith, holding that the government can enforce laws that burden religious beliefs or practices as long as the laws are “neutral” or “generally applicable”; and whether the government violates the First Amendment when it makes participation by a religious social-services agency in the foster-care system contingent on actions and statements by the agency that conflict with the agency’s religious beliefs. Read more via SCOTUS Blog