Trump Cases Upend Supreme Court Summer as New Term Looms

As a young lawyer working in the Reagan administration, John Roberts once quipped that only Supreme Court Justices and schoolchildren are “expected to and do take the entire summer off.”

Times have changed. Roberts, 70, begins his 21st year as chief justice after a busy summer of emergency docket action triggered by aggressive Trump administration moves.

Since the justices issued their last opinion of the 2024-25 term at the end of June, the 6-3 conservative court has granted at least nine emergency requests from the government, in cases that turn on key constitutional questions and have prompted sharp dissents from the liberal minority.

During the months once filled largely with vacation, law school teaching gigs in exotic locales, and book promotion, the justices also scheduled quick-turnaround arguments in matters tied to Trump’s tariffs and his attempted firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

How such an active summer affects the new term is anyone’s guess. But it raises questions about whether the pace of orders will compound any present tensions, said Yale Law School professor Justin Driver.

“I really do have deep fears that the incredible rate of decision making over this summer is going to have long-term negative consequences for dynamics within the Supreme Court itself,” Driver said Sept. 25 at a SCOTUSblog conference in Washington.

Driver, a former Supreme Court clerk, recalled “pressure building” as the term proceeded and the big cases were decided, getting to the point where it seemed clear that everybody needed “a break from each other.”

The upshot of no summer break, he said, may “lead to sharp elbows in opinions, not just in June, but in January, and that has long-term corrosive consequences,” he said.

Merits Term

The justices on Monday begin hearing oral arguments in a term that will include clashes over presidential power and disputes centered on the Voting Rights Act, transgender athletes, and counseling aimed at changing a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

They will fill up their calendar with more cases in the coming months. And there’s also no sign of the Trump administration slowing its unprecedented rate of emergency applications, which have come in response to lower court orders pausing many of its most far-reaching actions.

The court has so far granted roughly 20 of those applications this year, which “tells the Trump administration to keep pushing the envelope,” said Pamela Karlan, a director of Stanford Law School’s Supreme Court litigation clinic.

Justices have long dealt with an emergency docket, now colloquially known as the shadow docket. It is intended to offer a path to address issues that a petitioner claims need immediate attention, and they are decided without argument and little to no explanation.

Applications from death-row inmates are typically the most common, but the trend of emergency requests from presidents has taken off since the first Trump administration, before accelerating this year.

Some court-watchers don’t see the emergency demands straining the justices, citing the already historically low rate of fully briefed and argued cases. They issued 56 opinions in argued and signed cases last term, compared to an average of 160 per term in the 1980s.

Collegiality is ‘Good’

Perhaps the most significant opinion last term came on one of its final days, when a divided court curbed courts’ ability to issue nationwide orders halting presidential policies.

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a dissent called the decision an “existential threat to the rule of law,” prompting a biting rebuttal from conservative Amy Coney Barrett, who said her argument defied the “Constitution itself.”

“Jackson decries an imperial executive,” she said, “while embracing an imperial judiciary.”

On a press tour for her new book, Barrett has said such exchanges stem from a “battle of ideas” and that collegiality among the justices remains “really good.”

In the months since that opinion, the court issued a series of emergency orders siding with Trump, which the liberals have decried for disregarding precedent and flouting constitutional guarantees.

There is some precedent at the court for strongly divided decisions before a new term affecting the rest of it.

Karlan recalled clerking for Justice Harry Blackmun when the court granted temporary relief in a controversial death penalty case during the summer of 1985. At a conference the next year, Blackmun said a “sharp disagreement” at the start “colored the whole term,” she said.

To be sure, it’s still in the justices’ best interests to get along, said Gregory Magarian, a law professor at the University of Washington St. Louis.

“The fact of the matter is it’s their job and it’s a lot better job if you’re getting along well,” he said. “You can accomplish things if you’re getting along well with people.”