What to make of the Supreme Court’s tumultuous term

Landmark 6-3 decisions overshadow a smattering of liberal wins

A visitor at the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington — Image: New York Times / Redux / eyevine

Jul 2nd 2023|New York

IN MAY, AT the cusp of the Supreme Court’s busy season, Justice Elena Kagan heaped praise on John Roberts, the chief justice, as he received an award. Her “great, good friend” is “incapable of writing a bad sentence”, she said. “His writing has deep intelligence, crystal clarity, grace, humour, an understated style.” Five weeks later, dissenting from the court’s decision to nullify President Joe Biden’s plan to relieve borrowers of a chunk of student debt, she sang a different song. The chief justice’s majority opinion “from the first page to the last…departs from the demands of judicial restraint”. It fails, she wrote on the final day of the term, to represent “a court acting like a court”. Far from understated, Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion “overreached”.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Right at the end”