The justices’ regular caseload was overshadowed by requests from the president to allow some of his most controversial policies to go forward.
The Supreme Court term that ended Friday was consumed by an unprecedented crush of emergency asks from President Donald Trump that forced the justices to confront high-stakes questions about whether to quickly green-light some of his most controversial plans.
For a second year, Trump dominated the docket, culminating with the conservative majority handing the president a major win by making it more difficult for lower-court judges to halt his policies nationwide, including the president’s ban on birthright citizenship.
The court’s cursory but consequential decisions, on what critics call the shadow docket, overtook the rulings justices issued from their traditional docket. Many had a significant impact and allowed the Trump administration to implement policies that had been stymied in the lower courts.
The justices permitted the president to remove protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, fire independent agency regulators before their terms expired, kick transgender troops out of the military and give Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to the sensitive data of millions of Americans held by the Social Security Administration — all while litigation continues on the legality of each action.
“The emergency docket swallowed the court, both in terms of workload and even practical importance,” said attorney Gregory G. Garre, who represented President George W. Bush’s administration at the Supreme Court.
The emergency rulings, often issued without any explanation of the majority’s reasons, raised questions about how the court operates. The three liberal justices called out their colleagues in sharply worded written dissents for making consequential decisions on a short fuse.
“The risk of error increases when this court decides cases — as here — with bare-bones briefing, no argument and scarce time for reflection,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote when the court allowed Trump to freeze $65 million in teacher-training grants.
One order came in the middle of the night in April, when the justices temporarily blocked the Trump administration from invoking a wartime power to fast-track the deportations of migrants without due process.
“That’s just not how it’s supposed to work,” said attorney Deepak Gupta, who regularly argues before the court. He said that “one danger is that the American public will witness what looks to them like the creation of constitutional law by judicial reflex — snap decisions about basic rights and presidential power that bypass the traditional processes designed to ensure accuracy, fairness and democratic legitimacy.”
Heading into the presidential election last fall, the justices appeared to have chosen a set of cases for the traditional docket that would largely steer clear of major constitutional controversies.
Many resulted in relatively incremental decisions, a sharp contrast to big rulings in the last three terms that overturned long-standing precedent on abortion, affirmative action in college admissions and federal agency power.
There were big wins for conservatives and religious rights, most notably with the court voting 6-3 along ideological lines to uphold state bans on gender transition care for minors. That ruling was a major setback for transgender rights just five years after the court said a civil rights law prohibits workplace discrimination against gay and transgender workers.
Much like the court’s 2022 decision to eliminate the nationwide right to abortion, the justices left it to individual states to establish rules around medical care for transgender minors.
The court also split 6-3 in a decision written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. that allows religious parents to withdraw their children from public school lessons that use books with gay and transgender characters.
Conservative commentator Ed Whelan called it one of the four best terms for legal conservatives since the 1930s — with the other three also occurring in the years since Trump’s nominees from his first term cemented a supermajority and dramatically moved the court to the right.
But, Gupta noted, “the term ended up being defined not by the cases that the justices had originally chosen, but by the ones that Trump chose for them.”
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Major Supreme Court decisions of 2025
(Miriam Martincic/For The Washington Post)
The Supreme Court ended the 2024-2025 term with major decisions on nationwide injunctions for birthright citizenship, the Affordable Care Act’s preventive care mandate, and more.
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Solidifying the majority
In his 20th year on the bench, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. again steered the direction of the court. He broke his usual silence by pushing back on Trump’s calls for the impeachment of lower court judges who ruled against him and defended the judiciary’s role as a check on the excesses of the executive branch.
Roberts was in the majority more than any other justice, followed by two of Trump’s nominees — Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, according to the SCOTUSblog Stat Pack compiled by Jake Truscott and Adam Feldman.
“The center of the court is really deciding how far and how fast the court is going on the most important issues of the day,” said attorney Roman Martinez, who often appears before the court and was a law clerk to both Kavanaugh and Roberts.
The three justices in the middle, and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined the liberal bloc to uphold Biden-era regulations of untraceable firearms known as ghost guns, which have prompted concern from law enforcement officials.
While the justices rarely intervene to halt executions of death row inmates, the court took the extraordinary step of ordering a new trial for Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma inmate whose case drew international attention because the state’s Republican attorney general said prosecutors made critical errors.
What could have been one of the biggest decisions of the term fizzled. With Barrett — who is close friends with one of the lawyers involved — recused herself, the conservatives fell one vote short of requiring states to provide direct public funding for religious charter schools. The court deadlocked 4-4, leaving open the possibility that the question will come back to the full court in a new case involving different litigants.
There was also some surprising unanimity in several high-profile decisions written by liberal justices.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the opinion siding with a straight woman who claimed she was passed over for jobs that went to gay colleagues. The court unanimously struck down a legal standard that required members of groups that historically have not faced discrimination to meet a higher bar to prove workplace bias than members of minority groups.
Kagan penned the decision blocking the Mexican government from proceeding with an unusual lawsuit that sought to hold major U.S. firearms manufacturers accountable for gun violence in that country.
Sotomayor spoke for the court when it sided with a Catholic charity in Wisconsin, saying the state improperly discriminated based on religion when it denied the group a tax exemption.
Eric Rassbach, senior counsel with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said that in a polarized time, the unanimous decision siding with Catholic Charities was “a strong message to government officials everywhere to stop picking religious winners and losers and instead treat every religion with respect.”
The court also put on a united front in January, but with little consequence, when it upheld a federal law aimed at barring TikTok in the United States unless the wildly popular video-sharing app divested from Chinese ownership. Trump has delayed the ban-or-sale law three times since then.
Among the justices, Barrett again emerged as the most unpredictable. She joined the liberals in dissent when the court struck down rules regulating the discharge of water pollution and narrowing the landmark Clean Water Act. Barrett and Roberts joined the liberals in refusing to delay Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case in New York.
On the flip side, Barrett was aligned with Thomas in the transgender care case in saying that the court’s opinion left vulnerable laws involving access to bathrooms and sports that she suggested are valid. She partially joined Thomas and Alito in dissenting from the death penalty ruling in which the court ordered a new trial for Glossip.
Even though Barrett is the most junior justice on the conservative side, she was assigned by Roberts to write the most significant opinion of the term: sharply limiting federal judges from blocking presidential policies nationwide and dramatically restructuring the relationship between the courts and the executive.
“It’s a very clear sign that the chief trusts her with big cases,” Martinez said.
State of emergency
Since Trump returned to the White House, Solicitor General D. John Sauer has strategically raced to the Supreme Court for emergency help on key cases — more requests during that time frame than any of the last five presidents combined, including Trump during his first term.
While lower court judges have halted or scaled back many of Trump’s aggressive moves, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has repeatedly sided with the president, particularly backing his power over the federal bureaucracy.
The justices curbed Trump’s efforts to fast-track deportations of migrants without due process by using the Alien Enemies Act and ordered the administration to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego García, who was wrongly deported to El Salvador despite a court order prohibiting it.
But the majority cleared the way for Trump to deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens and strip temporary protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
Ilya Somin, an immigration law expert at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, said such rulings have “terrible real-world results, but this is an area where statutes arguably grant the president much discretion.”
At the start of the term, Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, a close watcher of the court, said the question was whether the Supreme Court would stand up to Trump’s boundary-pushing policies.
“The majority’s chosen response has largely been instead to stand aside,” Lazarus, a law school friend of Roberts who has taught classes with him, said in an email. Lazarus pointed to the court’s decision Friday in the birthright citizenship case, which did not address the constitutionality of the ban — at odds with long-standing court precedent and the nation’s history of granting citizenship to U.S.-born babies whose parents are undocumented migrants or foreign visitors with green cards.
Despite Trump’s talk of not complying with court orders, his sharp denunciation of judges who rule against him and his willingness to ignore settled law, Lazarus said, the majority has mostly treated Trump “as they would a normal President, entitled to all the deference and good faith assumptions to which the holder of that office is traditionally entitled. It is a disappointing result.”
The court’s final blockbuster decision, curtailing the power of lower court judges to issue nationwide injunctions, strongly suggests that emergency action is likely to continue this summer during the court’s traditional recess.
In a concurrence Friday, Kavanaugh said the Supreme Court would remain the “ultimate decisionmaker” about whether government policies are blocked or go into effect immediately as litigation continues.
William Baude, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, said the fire hose is not going to stop anytime soon.
“That’s partly because of the unusual number of illegal actions taken by the administration, and partly because of the unusually aggressive response from the lower courts, and partly because we now expect the Supreme Court to step in every time there is a major constitutional showdown,” said Baude, who was a law clerk to Roberts.
“But unless one of those three things changes, the emergency docket may become the new normal.”
