Professor and constitutional law expert Jason Mazzone recently joined Jon Hansen on the WGN radio show Let’s Get Legal to break down how the Supreme Court makes decisions, how the emergency docket works, and how the court has decided national issues quickly and with limited briefings.

Following oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, most legal experts agreed that although the Supreme Court will most likely decide against the government, the justices’ treatment of the Trump administration’s position lends it respectability and could ultimately allow Congress to return to the question of birthright citizenship.

In this special bonus episode, Professor Jason Mazzone joins the podcast to discuss the case of Trump v. Barbara, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on April 1, 2026. Mazzone is the Albert E. Jenner, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Illinois Program in Constitutional Theory, History, and Law. An expert on issues of constitutional structure and institutional design, with a particular focus on relationships between structural arrangements and individual rights, his groundbreaking work on the Constitution of the United States has appeared in dozens of prominent legal journals. He regularly advises, on a pro bono basis, litigants in cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and in other courts.

“There are few cases that are more important than this one,” Professor Jason Mazzone told the Chicago Tribune about the United States Supreme Court’s case deciding the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship. In an extensive article about how the end of birthright citizenship would affect those in Chicago, Mazzone told the Tribune the Court must rule the effort unconstitutional. “If you read the president’s executive order and you match it to the language of the 14th Amendment I think most people will see the flat contradiction between those two texts,” he said.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order that would end birthright citizenship as commonly understood. More than a year later, the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on the case, and Professors Jason Mazzone and Vikram Amar believe the order should be invalidated. Writing at Justia Verdict, the professors argue, again, that the order violates the first sentence of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment, and it also flouts the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.

Holding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents responsible for constitutional violations might lie with state legislatures. The New York Times, investigating legal mechanisms by which individuals could bring cases against ICE, cited Professor Jason Mazzone’s work examining the Illinois Bivens Act, which has promise according to Mazzone.

As Democrat-led states seek new laws that allow individuals to sue federal agents in response to tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Reuters quotes Professors Jason Mazzone and Vikram Amar on a law that Illinois recently passed. Their scholarship, originally published in Justia Verdict, called the Illinois law “innovative” but “imperfect” as a way to address these concerns.

For the first time in the 30-year history of the Sawyer Seminar Program, a team of Illinois faculty researchers have been awarded the prestigious grant, including College of Law Professor Jason Mazzone. The grant is given through Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to groups studying the challenges to democracy and academic freedom confronting US universities now. The Illinois initiative includes Susan Koshy (Asian American Studies and English), Rosalyn LaPier (History and American Indian Studies), Jason Mazzone (Law), and David Sepkoski (History).

In terms of impact, the biggest case before the United States Supreme Court in its current term is Trump v. Barbara, Professor Jason Mazzone predicted in the News-Gazette. The case, which will consider the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to individuals born in the United States, is “plainly unconstitutional,” he states. “I expect that when the court rules in Trump v. Barbara, it will issue a strongly originalist decision that deploys constitutional text, structure and history to reject the president’s attempt to evade the plain words of the Fourteenth Amendment. That will be a fitting outcome in the year in which we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” he concludes.

In October, the Illinois Legislature passed the Bivens Act, which provides new state-level protections for individuals interacting with Illinois courts, hospitals, schools, and child-care centers during civil immigration enforcement activities. Writing at Justia Verdict, Professors Jason Mazzone and Vikram Amar praise the law as “an important and innovative law in keeping with the proudest tradition of federalism”; however, they note that some aspects of the Act are unlikely to survive federal constitutional challenges. In their article, they explain why the law is good and why some parts are destined to be struck down.