Highlights of the 2006-2007 Supreme Court Term

When Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Supreme Court in 2005, he urged the Court to “promote clarity and guidance” and to rule with “a greater degree of consensus.” The 2006-07 term offered some clarity, but consensus proved elusive. Although some of the narrow decision-making that was a hallmark of the 2005-06 term remained, ambitious, divided decisions were far more prominent. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the Roberts Court in its first full term was the solidification of Justice Anthony Kennedy's role as the post-O'Connor median justice. During the 2006-07 term, Kennedy voted with the majority in every 5-4 decision as well as every split decision. He was also the only justice vote in agreement with every other justice at least half of the time. Liberals and Conservatives alike noted the changes this new alignment began to make in case outcomes and opinions.

Followers of voting patterns also noted that the Supreme Court continued its well-known recent trend of reversing decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. As it did last term, this term the Supreme Court affirmed fewer than one in five Ninth Circuit decisions. A less prominent but also evocative trend, however, was the reversal, in favor of habeas appellants, of several Texas Court of Criminal appeals decisions. The term gave court watchers their fill of suspense. Certainly, the Court took on cases in several areas of perennial curiosity to the public at large: abortion, the environment, affirmative action, the death penalty. More quietly, though, it granted cert. to address questions in patent, antitrust, administrative law and procedure, which had the potential to result in equally, if not more, profound changes. The Court's own procedures enhanced this topical suspense as it compressed the period from cert. grant to argument and followed a sparse calendar in March with a grueling seventeen cases in April. Shunning anticlimax, the Court capped its usual late-June barrage of high-profile decisions with a stunning reversal granting cert. in the Guantanamo detainee cases, Boumediene v. Bush (06-1195) and Al Odah v. U.S. (06-1196).

At the beginning of the term, three sets of cases stood out as being of great prospective interest to the public at large: the environmental regulation case, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency; the partial-birth abortion cases, Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood; and the affirmative action cases, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County. As anticipated, each decision generated a great deal of commentary within the press and the public at large. Many other commentators, however, found to be equally noteworthy decisions in antitrust, Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS, Inc. and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly; patent, KSR International Co. v. Teleflex, Inc. and MedImmune v. Genentech; and criminal procedure, Bowles v. Russell.