No second amendment cases on the docket.
The Supreme Court over the next month is poised to upend the way the country picks representatives to Congress, decide whether the First Amendment protects people who refuse to do business with same-sex couples and rule on whether President Trump’s tweets can be used in court to derail his agenda.
After what analysts described as a lackluster term last year, this year is shaping up to deliver a series of blockbuster rulings that will signal to lower courts how they should treat the unorthodox Mr. Trump.
The biggest test comes on the president’s travel ban. His opponents have begged the justices to hold Mr. Trump’s campaign-era tweets against him, saying his comments about Muslims taint the travel policy he announced once he took office.
Led by Hawaii, the case is also the first big test of the blue state anti-Trump resistance to reach the high court, and analysts said it will test how far the court will go in acting as a brake on the administration.
“The travel ban case presents the court with the opportunity to look behind the texts of the travel ban itself and the rationale offered by the government to the anti-Muslim animus expressed by Donald Trump not just on the campaign trail but several times since he has been in office,” said Robert Tuttle, a law professor at George Washington University.
Mr. Tuttle said he could see the court upholding the current version of the policy.
Lower appeals courts have taken a skeptical view of Mr. Trump’s policy, which restricts admission of citizens from a number of countries that don’t fully cooperate with U.S. travel policies, but the justices seemed more open to the policy during oral argument.
Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, said a win for Mr. Trump will also send a message to the district courts against the issuance of nationwide injunctions against the president’s policies.
“If the court rules for Trump, it will send a message to the lower courts that it is unacceptable for them to join the resistance no matter what they may think about the president’s motives,” Mr. Levey said. The travel case, known officially as Trump v. Hawaii, is one of 29 rulings the justices are expected to deliver by the end of June, when the 2017-2018 session concludes.
Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law, said the most important takeaway from the term thus far is the court’s slow pace in issuing its decisions.
It is also the first full session for Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, who set court-watchers atwitter this year when he sided with the four Democrat-appointed justices in ruling against a law allowing legal immigrants to be deported if they commit a violent crime. He said the law was too vague in defining what constituted “crimes of violence.”
Mr. Levey said Justice Gorsuch could be the deciding factor in many of the pending high-profile cases. The early signs are that the court has become more conservative since he filled the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.