The Supreme Court Will Do Four Things This Term That Tell You Everything You Need to Know

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In the week leading up to the October 2025 Supreme Court term, the impulse among court watchers will again be to do what we always do just before the first pitch on opening day: focus on a handful^[2] of high-octane merits cases as the frame for the court’s upcoming session. Splay out the work product as if it speaks for itself; cover the sausage^[3] instead of how it gets made. This habitual stentorian announcement of what the high court will be deciding was once merely myopic, ignoring ethics violations and judicial behavior as it did. But as the court becomes the handmaiden of the Trump administration and the brickbat with which to cudgel lower courts and democracy itself into MAGA compliance, the start-of-term “curtain-raiser” has moved from distraction to collusion. If it’s true that the six members of the ultraconservative Trumpist majority are responsible for the systematized shredding of the independence of federal agencies^[4], the kneecapping of district court judges^[5], and the abuse of the shadow docket^[6] as Trump’s get-out-of-jail-free card for constitutional limitations on autocrats, why cover everything but that as the preview of the impending term?

Maybe a more useful and illuminating way to think about the cases already docketed for review in the coming months is to ask whether a high court that was behaving like an actual court would even be hearing most of them. In other words, why choose to scrutinize a fistful of merits cases and their supposed legal underpinnings, i.e., what the court wants us to focus on, in service of its claims to immutable legitimacy, rather than to ask questions about the legitimacy of the entire enterprise itself? If we can stipulate to the fact that legitimate courts hew to certain hallmarks of judicial legitimacy—including respect for precedent (stare decisis), showing your work, institutional humility, and treating like cases alike—then many if not most of the cases on the schedule for the term that opens this week shouldn’t be there in the first place. Consider these ordinary factors, which all lawyers learn after one week of law school and all federal judges profess to abide by the week of their confirmation hearings, and contemplate how the Supreme Court has in recent sessions obliterated them to dust—and will do so again this term.

1) Precedent. There’s not a great deal of dispute that the U.S. Supreme Court must do certain things in order to appear to be operating as a court, as opposed to a reckless super-legislature. Stare decisis, or respect for precedent, is foremost among them. As Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor put it in their dissenting opinion in Dobbs^[7], “Stare decisis is the Latin phrase for a foundation stone of the rule of law: that things decided should stay decided unless there is a very good reason for change. It is a doctrine of judicial modesty and humility.” They added that respect for existing precedent “contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process” by ensuring that decisions are “founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.” Stare decisis provides that the high court may not overrule a decision, even a constitutional one, without a “special justification” and that it “must have a good reason to do so over and above the belief that the precedent was wrongly decided.”

In Dobbs, the majority steamrolled those special justifications, and in subsequent terms we have seen case after case overturned without looking back. From affirmative action^[8] to the power of federal agencies^[9] to abortion^[10] and the composition of independent agencies^[11], the Roberts court has no compunctions about discarding precedent. As Clarence Thomas reportedly told an audience^[12] at Catholic University last week, he feels no obligation to follow precedent “if I find it doesn’t make any sense” and that if it’s “totally stupid, and that’s what they’ve decided, you don’t go along with it just because it’s decided.”

So instead of breathlessly reciting names of cases coming before the court in the upcoming term, we should perhaps just reference the bedrock precedents each one is poised to overturn: In the first days of the session, the justices will consider, in Louisiana v. Callais^[13], whether the state somehow violated the Constitution by drawing a map that complies with the Voting Rights Act, as interpreted by a Supreme Court decision^[14] that’s barely 3 years old. The court will also hear National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC^[15], which seeks to overturn a 24-year-old precedent preserving^[16] what remains of campaign finance law. Trump v. Slaughter^[17], to be heard in December, seeks to reverse the 90-year-old Humphrey’s Executor^[18] precedent protecting independent agencies. Soon after, it will decide^[19] whether to let Trump fire^[20] Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, over dubious allegations of mortgage fraud; the case could upend the principle of central bank independence, a standard that reaches back centuries.

Given this set of hors d’oeuvres, is it any wonder that former Kentucky court clerk Kim Davis is openly asking that the court overturn its 2015^[22] decision in Obergefell v. Hodges^[23], which recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage? The Republican-appointed justices have already declared open season on precedent they hate. Why not shoot your shot?

2) Showing Your Work. Another crucial component of a legitimate judiciary lies in its ability to support decisions with reasoning and logic^[24], to allow future judges to apply like facts to like facts and to extend the reasoning of a given opinion to similarly situated disputes. But with alarming and increasing frequency, the high court delivers swaths of its most consequential decisionmaking on the shadow docket^[25], without briefing or argument or even reasoned opinion writing. As of this writing, the high court has sided with the Trump administration in 84 percent of shadow-docket cases^[26]. And that Trump administration has rushed more cases to the emergency docket in nine months than the Biden administration did in four years. We also now know that these unexplained opinions are meant to (we think?) serve as precedent^[27], demanding that lower-court judges make their best guess about what future law may hold.

3) Judicial Humility. Supreme Court justices are not scientists, or physicians^[28], or geologists, or experts on air pollution. They are not even intended to be the triers of facts, as that is the task of the lower courts. They are meant to know what they don’t know, and to understand what the institutional role demands of them^[29]. Yet in recent years we have seen justices make pronouncements about how medicine works, about how water and air pollution work, and about wholly invented facts in cases. In a worrying new turn, some of the justices now criticize lower courts for failing to love honor and obey the justices’^[30] directives, even if those directives arrive without reasoning or explanation.

4) Treating Like Cases Alike. For four years, the conservative justices cheerfully struck down Biden administration policies on the theory that they raised questions of “vast economic and political significance^[35]” that could not be decided absent congressional authorization. This so-called major-questions doctrine functioned as a free-floating veto over any Biden policies the majority disliked. Now, in Learning Resources v. Trump, the court will have to decide whether Trump’s will-he-won’t-he tariffs—ostensibly justified by a federal emergency statute that emphatically does not empower the president^[36] to impose tariffs as he sees fit—also raise questions of “vast economic and political significance.” If the court allows the tariffs to stand despite their utter lack of congressional approval, it will be clear that the major-questions doctrine applies only to major Democratic presidents.

There will be a hundred pieces this week attempting to pick through the “big cases” to be decided in the approaching term—although, to be sure, most of the big cases will be added in the months to come. But focusing on a handful of “big cases” relies on your predicate agreement as a reader that the court that will decide them, with all the oyez and the gravitas, is still behaving, in the main, like a court. The challenge will be to seek out that which the court is obscuring in this performance of business as usual this term, and to understand that the red curtains and the black robes have very rapidly come to serve as props in a performance of judicial legitimacy that is no longer worth the price of admission.

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