The US Supreme Court’s Monday orders added five new cases on a range of topics from the EPA to race discrimination in media, but denied a case filed by a current Guantanamo prisoner.

A Yemeni national, al-Alwi, has been held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for 17 years, since the early days of the war on terror. His current case poses a question left open by former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s plurality opinion: whether, in the event that this war is unlike the wars that informed it and becomes perpetual, the military would be authorized to hold someone indefinitely as a combatant. Additionally al-Alwi challenged whether the war he supposedly participated in had ended. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a separate opinion arguing it was past time to revisit this question, but the majority decided to deny certiorari to al-Alwi.

The Supreme Court did grant certiorari in Atlantic Ritchfield Co. v Christian, a case that seeks to determine whether common law judgments can order a remedy contrary to an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) remedy under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA).

The Supreme Court will also hear McKinney v. Arizona, examining the Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of someone sentenced to death. Specifically, the court will review whether, for the purposes of resentencing, a state court must apply current law or the law at the time the defendant was sentenced.

Intel Corp. v. Sulyma will ask the court to determine whether a statute of limitations for a federal right of private action begins when the information that is the basis of the action is disclosed by the company or when the plaintiff first reads it and discovers it.

The court will review an aspect of the Hague Convention in Monasky v. Taglieri to determine how a child’s habitual residence under the Hague Convention is determined and whether determinations of habitual residence are reviewed de novo or with any kind of deference to existing decisions.

Lastly, the Supreme Court added Comcast Corp. v. National Association of African American-Owned Media to determine if a § 1981 claim fails in the absence of but-for causation.