Supreme Court predictions 2026-2027: who retires, who is named next, and how the big cases resolve

They resolve on the Supreme Court's own orders list, the batch release of case grants and denials the Court issues after its private conferences, which is confirmed through the Court's docket or credible legal reporting. A cert grant needs the votes of at least four of the nine justices, the rule of four. The Court grants only a small fraction of the several thousand petitions filed each term, so most single-case cert markets price low until a real circuit split or emergency application signals the justices are close to taking the issue up at conference.

The Court's hardest, most contested opinions cluster in the final weeks before its summer recess: these are the ones with dissents and concurrences that take longest to negotiate. The birthright-citizenship and transgender-athletes rulings both landed June 30, 2026, the same day the Alito retirement contracts had to price NPR's false retirement story.

Each contract has its own deadline and resolves No if the named event has not occurred by then. Kalshi's Alito contracts split into an effective-date family, which needs an actual resignation, and an announcement family, which pays on a public statement of intent regardless of when the departure takes effect. Reading which family a contract belongs to matters more than its headline.

It is a single Kalshi market with one contract per named candidate, each resolving Yes only if that person is the first confirmed to a Supreme Court seat by January 20, 2029. No name is officially nominated as of July 2026; the ladder tracks reported shortlist names, mostly sitting federal appellate judges. If no vacancy opens, every contract in the ladder resolves No.

It varies by market family. Confirmation and count markets cite the Library of Congress. Retirement markets cite named news organizations, official government records, or the justice's own statement. Some cert and rehearing markets settle on reporting from a defined list of news agencies rather than the court record directly, so the same real-world event can settle a market differently depending on how it is covered.

They are not asking the same question. Kalshi runs a separate effective-date contract and announcement contract for Alito; Polymarket runs only an announcement contract. Comparing an effective-date price to an announcement price will always show a gap, since the effective date, by definition, comes after any announcement.

It is the Court's own norm that four of the nine justices, not a majority of five, can vote to grant a petition for certiorari and put a case on the docket. It is one reason a cert-grant market can move on a single dissent from a cert denial, since that dissent often signals the vote was close to four.

The Court's June 30, 2026 ruling in the consolidated Idaho and West Virginia cases upheld those states' own laws barring transgender athletes from girls' and women's school sports; it did not itself impose a nationwide rule. The open contract asks a stricter question: it resolves Yes only if the Supreme Court itself rules to ban transgender athletes from women's sports before January 1, 2029. A ruling that lets states set their own bans does not meet that bar.

Nine: one Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices, a number Congress fixed in 1869. Nine is not constitutionally required, which is why a market trades on whether the size of the Court changes before January 20, 2029.

For life. The Constitution lets federal judges hold office "during good Behaviour," the document's own phrase, so there is no term limit and no mandatory retirement age; a seat opens only through retirement, resignation, death, or removal. That is what makes retirement timing a tradable question: the decision belongs entirely to the justice.

Yes. The House can impeach a justice by majority vote and the Senate can remove one with a two-thirds vote, the same process used for presidents. It has happened once: Samuel Chase was impeached in 1804 and acquitted in 1805. No justice has ever been removed, which is context for the market on whether a sitting justice is charged with a federal crime.

It already has once: the Court decided the consolidated IEEPA tariff cases on February 20, 2026, holding the statute does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. The open market asks a different question: whether the Court grants certiorari to a new case primarily about Trump tariffs before January 1, 2027.