Chiles v. Salazar (24-539)
- Term
- OT2025
- Argued
- 2025-10-07
- Decided
- 2026-03-31
- Vote
- 8-1 for Chiles
- Opinion
- Justice Gorsuch
- Majority
- Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett
- Dissent
- Jackson
The case in brief
Facts
Kaley Chiles is a licensed mental-health counselor in Colorado who offers only talk therapy, with no medicines or physical treatments. In 2019, Colorado passed a law barring licensed counselors from practicing "conversion therapy" on minors, meaning efforts to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity, while still allowing counselors to support clients' identity exploration or gender transition. Chiles sued state officials in federal court, arguing that the law violates her free-speech rights as applied to her talk therapy, and asked for a preliminary injunction (an early court order blocking enforcement). The trial court and the Tenth Circuit appeals court refused, reasoning that the law mainly regulates professional conduct and affects speech only incidentally, so it needed only a lenient level of review. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to settle a disagreement among lower courts about laws like Colorado's.
Question
Does Colorado's law, as applied to a counselor's talk therapy, regulate conduct or speech, and if it regulates speech, does it violate the First Amendment's free-speech protection?
Conclusion
Chiles won 8-1, in an opinion by Justice Gorsuch, with Justice Jackson as the only dissenter. The Court held that, as applied to Chiles's talk therapy, the law regulates speech based on the speaker's viewpoint, and the lower courts were wrong to use such a lenient standard of review. The Court reasoned that calling her words "treatment" does not turn speech into conduct, because the law lets her voice support for some goals but not others. Justice Kagan, joined by Justice Sotomayor, agreed but wrote that a law limiting a topic without favoring one viewpoint would raise a harder question.
Holding
Justice Gorsuch delivered an 8-1 opinion, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. The Court held that Colorado's conversion therapy ban regulates speech based on viewpoint — it permits counselors to express acceptance of a client's sexual orientation or gender identity but forbids speech aimed at changing those attributes. The opinion rested on three pillars: (1) talk therapy is pure speech, the 'quintessential form of protected expression,' and cannot be recharacterized as 'conduct' through labeling; (2) the law discriminates based on viewpoint; (3) no historical tradition of content regulation (medical licensing, informed consent, malpractice) supports diminished First Amendment protection here.
Pre-decision prediction
Chiles 6-3 (72% confidence, raw).
Opinion of the Court
Authored by Justice Gorsuch (20,488 words total).
3/31/2026 3:24:45 PM
Compare Results Old File:
66 pages (376 KB) 3/30/2026 4:10:57 PM
66 pages (377 KB) 3/31/2026 3:23:47 PM
Replacement Insertions Deletions
Go to First Change (page 46)
file://NoURLProvided[3/31/2026 3:24:45 PM]
Styling and Annotations
Excerpt of 8 of 144 paragraphs. Full opinion available on the interactive page or in the official PDF.
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