Supreme Court Goes Back to Normal in Term With Few Blockbusters

After blockbusters dominated the docket in back-to-back terms, the US Supreme Court is returning to a bit of normalcy.

The first half of the court’s current term looked like those of the past as the justices spent most of it grappling with technical procedural questions and considering how to interpret tricky statutes.

Challenges to federal regulations for hard-to-trace “ghost guns” and access to gender-affirming care for transgender minors were the highest-profile cases argued, but a couple noteworthy disputes teed up for 2025 could make the second half of the term a little more exciting than the first.

“They’ve had two pretty high-profile terms the last two years and so the idea of maybe slowing down doesn’t sound, to me at least, like a mistake in general,” Carter Phillips, a Sidley Austin LLP partner and longtime Supreme Court lawyer, said on Bloomberg Law’s “Cases and Controversies” Supreme Court podcast.

In recent terms, the court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, effectively ended the use of race as a factor in college admission decisions, and expanded gun rights. It also curtailed the power of federal regulators, threw out a federal ban on bump stock devices that allow guns to fire rapidly like a machine gun, and granted Donald Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution.

“It’s sort of crazy when you have a court deciding so many high-profile contentious issues all in one term,” said Daniel Ortiz, a University of Virginia School of Law professor. “We need a little rest between taking on big cases.”

But a quieter term may not have been intentional. Big cases tend to lump together and the 6-3 conservative majority had been sending out signals that the new court was open for business, Ortiz said.

“We’ve now seen the first wave of that,” he said. “There will be a little bit of a lull, but there may be another wave coming up at some point too.”

Unappetizing Cases

The court is also operating a little like it used to in the past. The justices released its first opinion of the term in November. That hasn’t happened since 2021, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis.

“I think we are moving back to an equilibrium,” said Adam Feldman, who studies the Supreme Court and created Empirical SCOTUS, a statistical blog on the court.

The justices have issued three opinions in argued cases so far. Two of the three were only a sentence long because the court dismissed separate securities fraud cases involving Meta Platforms Inc.'s Facebook and Nvidia Corp. as improvidently granted.

Those decisions show the court is having a surprising amount of “buyer’s remorse” this year, Ortiz said.

“From their point of view, they were probably eating out on caviar last term and getting back to normal is a bit unappetizing,” he said.

Not everyone agrees it’s business as usual this term.

Dismissing cases as improvidently granted that were fully briefed and argued when the court takes a limited number of cases isn’t normal, said Melissa Murray, a New York University School of Law professor and co-host of “Strict Scrutiny,” a Supreme Court podcast.

“Just because the court doesn’t have the opportunity to overrule another precedent, as they’ve done each of the last three years, doesn’t make this a normal term or a normal court,” she said.

On Dec. 9, the court refused to add another case involving transgender minors to its docket. The court declined over the dissent of three justices to consider a lawsuit brought by a group of Wisconsin parents seeking to challenge the gender identity policy at the public school their children attend.

The school district had noted the lower court dismissed the case because the school’s policy hadn’t impacted any of the parents’ children. Justice Samuel Alito said he would’ve granted the case because it raises an important question about parental rights and whether transgender kids can transition without their parents’ consent.

Murray noted that came about a week after Alito appeared to have no concern for parental prerogatives during the Dec. 4 arguments in a challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

“The inconsistency, and the baldness of the inconsistency, I don’t think is normal,” she said.

Trump Effect

In the second half of the term, the court will hear another attack on regulators in a dispute over the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband internet subsidy program. It will also hear arguments on Jan. 15 in a case challenging a Texas law that requires porn sites to verify the ages of users.

The justices agreed Dec. 18 to hear a dispute in January over TikTok Inc. after the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a law banning the social media platform in the US unless its Chinese parent company gives up ownership.

The court taking the appeal is a big deal, said Pat Sobkowski, who teaches constitutional law at Marquette University.

The law being challenged has created some considerable outrage, he said.

Donald Trump will also take office for his second White House term and legal scholars expect to see a flurry of executive orders that the court may be asked to block.

The court’s emergency, or so-called shadow docket, could explode again, said Dan Cotter, a partner at Dickinson Wright, who writes “Cotter’s Corner,” column on the Supreme Court and lower courts for the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin.

It’s unclear if any of those disputes will reach the court’s merits docket in time to be argued by the end of April when the justices typically stop hearing cases for the term.

“It depends on how fast some of these actions take place,” Cotter said.