The Supreme Court wrapped up its most recent term last week, handing down the final three decisions to cap off their caseload until the next term begins in October.
Some terms pass without any major decisions or themes. But this year, it’s being described as the “Trump term.”
President Donald Trump, through executive action, brought several cases to the justices for consideration. Many of the president’s most important cases were struck down by the conservative-leaning court.
Additionally, this year, the end of the term looked a little different than in recent years.
SCOTUSblog has the numbers. Last term, about 15% of rulings were decided along that 6-3 split. This term, about 29% of the cases were decided along those lines.
But while the big, headline-making cases are often decided 6-3, or by similar margins, the number of unanimous cases also increased from last term to 44% of all cases.
Here’s what this term taught us about the court, its relationship with Trump, and impacts on the broader public.
Supreme Court expert Sarah Isgur said that the political left and the political right will both look at this term and say Trump won based on the outcome of several big cases.
But the justices handed Trump major losses as well, including in the tariff case, the effort to end birthright citizenship, and his effort to remove Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.
Still, Trump earned some wins from the court, as they overturned two long-standing precedents.
The court ruled that Trump did have the power to remove Rebecca Slaughter from her position as a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, overturning a 1935 precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. The very next day, the court overturned a 2001 precedent by ending spending limits for political parties working with candidates in a case stemming from Vice President JD Vance.
Experts say that while it’s clear Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito often agree with the arguments made by the Trump administration, the court is largely made up of “pre-Trump conservatives.”
“I do think that you are dealing with an originalist court by and large, that came up in the pre-Trump world. And it’s really interesting to me how you can take that last term and you can take previous terms and sort of track them onto pre-Trump conservative movement priorities (versus) MAGA priorities,” law commentator David French said at a Supreme Court term wrap-up event.
French pointed to the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a pre-Trump, conservative value that the court agreed with, but in regard to “MAGA legal priorities” like ending birthright citizenship, the court is putting up more resistance.
Thanks to SCOTUSblog’s analysis of the decisions, that point can be proven by visualization of the data.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett still sides with the conservatives more than the liberal justices, but she sided with Justice Elena Kagan 68% of the time and Justice Sonia Sotomayor 65% of the time. Barrett in particular has earned criticism from some of Trump’s biggest supporters for issuing opinions that disagree with arguments made by the administration. Experts see her as a middle marker on the court and increasingly influential in how the court will decide.
The same is true for two other Trump appointees. Justice Neil Gorsuch sided with Kagan and Sotomayor 65% and 62% of the time, respectively. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed with each of them 68% of the time.
Chief Justice John Roberts also sided with them in several cases. Roberts, who has held the senior court position since 2005, tends to agree 71% of the time with Kagan.
Roberts authored the majority opinion in striking down Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. The decision was handed down 5-4 and Roberts was joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Kavanaugh concurred in part and dissented in part. Thomas, Gorsuch and Alito filed dissenting opinions.
While experts predicted that the justices would overturn Trump’s order, the way they would decide and who would join either side was up for debate.
Isgur, on her “Advisory Opinions” podcast with French, said there’s more to the story on how they ruled.
There were the five justices who say the 14th Amendment guarantees and has always guaranteed birthright citizenship to anyone born on American soil, with caveats for the children of diplomats, foreign enemies and a few other exceptions.
Meanwhile, Kavanaugh essentially said he doesn’t believe “that’s the end of the 14th Amendment,” and there were more exceptions to the amendment, but it doesn’t matter since Congress in 1950 codified birthright citizenship, Isgur explained.
The dissent is where things become interesting. Thomas, in fact, wrote a 91-page dissent explaining his position, the longest of his more than 30 years on the court.
The four justices in the minority weren’t saying that Trump’s order was “good to go,” she said. Instead, they argue that there’s a difference between a temporary visitor giving birth in the U.S. versus a more permanent visitor and the parents’ desire to remain in the country.
French and Isgur agreed that it’s “actually difficult” to look at the dissents and parse out how many of them actually agreed with Trump’s executive order compared to how many of the four of them just disagreed with the arguments made by the five in the majority.
“So, I actually think at the end of the day, we do not have a 5-4 on the constitutional question that Trump advances,” French said.
They pointed to Kavanaugh very clearly stating that Trump’s order cannot move forward, bringing the majority more up to 6, and Gorsuch’s argument about temporary versus permanent residents that could bring it up to 7. The 7-2 or 6-3 ruling is largely what experts were predicting, making it necessary to break down why the 5-4 is more complicated than it is at face value.
No matter if it was any one of those combinations, it still delivered a blow to one of Trump’s key agenda items. He even made history by becoming the first sitting president to attend oral arguments.
After the ruling, he posted online that it was “too bad” but he’d seek legislation in Congress. However, days later, he said the ruling was wrong and he’d ask the court for a rehearing. A rehearing requires the losing party to file a petition 25 days after the ruling, and they are extremely rare, with the last rehearing dated back to 1965.
The justices are now on their summer break period, which seems like it won’t be as busy as last year.
In the summer of 2025, Trump brought several emergency filings to the justices through the emergency docket, also known as the shadow docket.
These rulings have at times been criticized because the decision doesn’t typically include context or reasoning.
Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told the Deseret News last year that the court is deciding a record low number of cases, but they continued to make headlines both during and well past their term because of the emergency docket.
The Trump administration has increased its use of the emergency docket. The Biden administration filed a total of 19 emergency applications during its four years in office. The Trump administration filed 20 within just the first few months of returning to power in Washington.
Zachary Shemtob, the executive editor at SCOTUSblog, joined David Lat for his podcast “Original Jurisdiction” to discuss the end of the term. There, Shemtob said there’s “not much of anything” sitting on the emergency docket list right now.
There’s only one major case on the emergency or interim dockets, he said, and it’s a case stemming from Texas, asking the court to determine if a state law can require age verification for downloading apps from an app store. Shemtob said there’s a possibility of a challenge to Trump’s East Wing ballroom renovation, too.
“Unlike last year, which was absolutely chock-full of one emergency petition after another from the administration, so far it’s crickets, and I’m sure the Supreme Court is very happy about that,” Shemtob said.
In part, the reduction in emergency docket cases stems from fewer executive actions taken by Trump.
For example, during his first 100 days back in office, from Jan. 20-April 29, 2025, Trump signed 142 executive orders. During that same January-April period in 2026, the president had signed just 33 orders.
Isgur agreed. She predicted that last summer’s emergency docket action was likely going to be the “high water mark” for the rest of Trump’s term, though she said “who knows” what the next president could do.
“It really dominated last summer. We aren’t seeing any of that recently, and I mean, like, for months we haven’t seen it,” Isgur said. “So, the justices, I know, were feeling overworked based on all the emergencies in the interim docket that they were seeing that it just, like, expanded beyond all possible belief.”
Shapiro, in a column after the term ended, dubbed the court a “small c conservative court,” but also one with a lot of fluidity.
When looking at the court in a 3-3-3 manner, with Kagan, Jackson and Sotomayor as left-leaning, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch as more right-leaning, and Roberts, Barrett and Kavanaugh more in the middle, it’s clear that the middle team was in the majority most often, he said.
Roberts and Kavanaugh tied for the most frequencies in the majority, followed by Barrett.
Roberts and Kavanaugh were each in the majority 95% of the time and Barrett was 92% of the time. Roberts and Kavanaugh also agreed and voted together 94% of the time.
Some liberal critics have floated the idea that Kavanaugh is looking to be the next chief justice once Roberts retires.
Speaking of retirements, justices can announce they will be retiring at any point in time, but many have done it once the term is over. With Thomas at 81, Alito at 76 and Roberts at 71, the court’s justices are aging. There were questions swirling about an end-of-term retirement before the midterm elections.
NPR erroneously last week published an article saying Alito was retiring, which he has not made any sort of announcement about. NPR took down the article and admitted the mistake.
So, now the countdown to the October 2026 term begins.
Lat believes and hopes that it will be a more relaxed term, saying he is of the belief that there are on- and off-again busy years.
“In a self-serving spirit, I think the justices should give all of us commentators a break and maybe have a somewhat sleepier term. And it’s shaping up to be that way so far. There are some big cases, but I don’t think it’s going to be the kind of blockbuster term that October term 2025 was,” Lat said.
Lat said, on a more serious note, he hopes the court could try to “take the temperature in the room down” for the broader public. Things are difficult because they’re so polarized, he said.
French noted the “horseshoe theory,” where the extremes of either party swing so far one way, they tend to meet up and have the same belief.
“The far left and the far right are hating this court. They hate this court and they’re hating this court for a very similar reason that they’re not getting everything they want from this court,” French said. “One of the problems with extremism in this country right now is extremists are not only extreme … part of the extremism means that they can’t even acknowledge good faith disagreement.”
Shapiro put it best closing out his column, noting that the next term begins the first Monday of October.
“For now, we have all summer to digest what the justices have wrought,” he said.
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