Sponsored by The New York Historical

In the Review’s August 20 issue, David Cole surveys the Supreme Court’s 2025–2026 term. How’s the judicial branch dealing with the country’s slide into autocracy?

The term just concluded offered good news and bad news. The good news is that the Court will sometimes check Trump when he acts unlawfully. In this sense, it functioned as a court, not as a politically partisan institution. That is essential to the preservation of the rule of law, and should not be discounted.

But the bad news is that the Court is also more willing than ever to thrust aside prior decisions that get in the way of its desired outcomes. Limits on presidential power are essential to a constitutional democracy, but so, too, are limits on the Court’s power.

While in a few major cases—including rulings that upheld birthright citizenship and struck down the president’s attempts to unilaterally impose tariffs—some of the Court’s conservatives (although never Clarence Thomas) voted with their three liberal colleagues to, as Cole writes, “enforce limits against Trump,” the Roberts Court nonetheless “recognizes few limits on its own power. In particular, it too often runs roughshod over prior decisions to achieve conservative results simply because it disagrees with those prior decisions.”

Below, alongside Cole’s essay, are five articles from our archive about the Roberts Court.

David Cole
Close Calls

In the Supreme Court’s recently concluded term, it showed that it is willing to constrain Trump but less willing to accept limits on its own authority.

Duncan Hosie
The End of Equity

By effectively sanctioning ICE’s raids in Los Angeles, the Supreme Court is showing its readiness to discard centuries of equitable tradition in law.

—September 19, 2025

David Cole
Umpires No More

In several major cases in its 2024–2025 term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority reached its desired results not by overturning precedent but by ignoring it.

—August 21, 2025

Noah Feldman
The Last Bulwark

The fate of our democracy today depends on the judiciary’s commitments to liberty, constitutionalism, and legality.

—May 15, 2025

Laurence H. Tribe
Deconstructing Dobbs

Whether or not one sees the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision as barely concealed theocracy, it fails to provide any coherent legal analysis of why the right to abortion is not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

—September 22, 2022

Cass R. Sunstein
Who Should Regulate?

The question of whether federal agencies or the courts should have the right to interpret legislation may seem technical, but it significantly affects the power of the government.

—May 26, 2022

Annette Gordon-Reed
Uprooting Rights

Alito merely declares that abortion is a special case because a life is taken (a theological pronouncement that should not be the basis of a legal opinion in a pluralistic society) and insists that the reasoning in the opinion can’t, and won’t, be applied to deny other rights that are based on words to which “the Constitution makes no reference” and did not exist for groups who were oppressed in the past. But this does not reassure.

—May 9, 2022

New Subscriber Benefit!

Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles.

Special Offer
Subscribe for just $1 an issue

Get the deal

Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas

You are receiving this message because you signed up
for email newsletters from The New York Review.

Update your address or preferences

View this newsletter online

The New York Review of Books
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305