I'm Elizabeth Lattery and I'm Tiffany Bates and welcome to SCOTUS 101, where we break down what's happening at the Supreme Court, what the justices are up to and other things related to our favorite branch of government.

This week we're talking about all the new opinions from this week, Justice Thomas dissenting from Justice Thomas, and we sit down with

Seventh Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

We know what the court was up to during its winter break.

They released eight opinions over the course of this week.

We're not going to talk about all eight because that would take us all afternoon, but we're

going to hit the highlights from some of those decisions.

So first up was Hernandez versus Mesa. This was a 5-4 decision by Justice Alito. He was joined by the other

conservatives on the court. The court affirmed the Fifth Circuit's dismissal of a lawsuit filed by

the parents of a 15-year-old Mexican boy who was killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in a

disputed cross-border incident. So the agent was standing on U.S. soil when he shot the boy who was killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in a disputed cross-border incident.

So the agent was standing on U.S. soil when he shot the boy who was standing on Mexican soil

after having gone back across the border from the United States.

The Supreme Court held the decision in Bivens versus six unknown federal narcotics agents

from 1971, authorizing damages damages lawsuits against federal agents for violations

of Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights does not extend to claims based on a cross-border shooting.

Expansion of Bivens, which authorized claims against the federal government, despite the lack of a

federal statute creating such a claim, is, as Alito wrote, a disfavored judicial activity. The majority noted that these

claims arise in a new context that is significantly different than prior Bivens claims and that

several factors counsel hesitation in expanding Bivens remedies here, including the fact that Congress

has repeatedly declined to authorize the award of damages against federal officials for injuries inflicted outside of the United States.

So under these circumstances, the court found that judges should not create a cause of action that extends across U.S. borders.

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