Here’s a look at the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Chiles v. Salazar:
1. What did the Supreme Court rule in Chiles v. Salazar?
On March 31, 2026, the Court found that a lower court erred when it upheld the constitutionality of a Colorado law preventing licensed mental health counselors from offering conversion therapy to patients under 18. The therapy involves counseling people to return to their biological gender identity or sexual orientation. The Court concluded that the law targeted a specific viewpoint and would have to be weighed with a standard of “strict scrutiny.”
2. What happens next?
The lower court has been tasked with applying the strict-scrutiny test, a very high bar to meet. For Colorado to prevail, it would have to show that the law was “narrowly tailored,” advanced a compelling government interest, and was the least-restrictive way to address that interest. The Colorado law is almost certainly going to be struck down.
3. What does the Supreme Court’s ruling mean for regulating professional counselors and therapists?
There are still a lot of questions. Government has long had the right to regulate professional conduct, but states are now on notice that professional regulations focused on speech will be constitutionally suspect. It’s difficult to imagine, though, that verbal misinformation or misleading speech by a licensed counselor would go unregulated just because it’s speech.
4. Are there ways to make government rules on conversion counseling constitutional?
The Colorado law was doomed because it took one side of a public health debate and banned it from use by licensed professionals.
As Justice Elena Kagan wrote, “Because the State has suppressed one side of a debate, while aiding the other, the constitutional issue is straightforward. It would, however, be less so if the law under review was content-based but viewpoint-neutral.”
That suggests that a law designed to regulate what a therapist can discuss in gender-related counselling might survive judicial scrutiny if it doesn’t stack the deck for one side over the other.
5. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the sole dissenting opinion in the case. What was her view?
Justice Jackson saw the Colorado law as permissible government regulation of licensed medical practice.
“Talk therapy is a medical treatment. So, why wouldn’t such speech-based medical treatments be subject to reasonable state regulation like any other kind of medical care?,” she wrote.
Jackson sees the practice of conversion therapy as potentially harmful and asserted that the state has an obligation to prevent harmful medical practices, even if the therapy is conducted through speech.
‘Not only is conversion therapy ineffective, former participants report that it causes lasting psychological harm. Gay and transgender children who underwent nonaversive conversion therapy say they were taught to feel shame and self-hatred.” she wrote. “Survivors continue to suffer from PTSD, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. As one survivor put it, conversion therapy “‘came close to killing me.’”
See also: Supreme Court rules against Colo. ban on conversion therapy for LGBT kids
Ken Paulson is the director of the Free Speech Center.
The Free Speech Center newsletter offers a digest of First Amendment and news-media news every other week. Subscribe for free here: https://bit.ly/3kG9uiJ