As Americans awaited a series of June rulings by the Supreme Court in a number of sensitive cases, the general impression was that Chief Justice John Roberts would side with his conservative colleagues in virtually all these cases. While he did in some, he joined the liberal justices in three key cases, one involving the rights of the LBGTQ community, another the DACA program, and the third a Louisiana abortion law. Roberts seems to have replaced Anthony Kennedy as the swing vote on the Court, and the Court can now be rightfully called the Roberts Court. We will examine the key decisions of the Court this past term and analyze the jurisprudence of the hard-to-predict Chief Justice.
Larry Rand has a Bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard, and a Master’s in History from Trinity College. He taught history and constitutional law at Kent School in Connecticut for 40 years, eighteen of which were spent as chair of the history department. He is Program Director at the Taconic Learning Center in Salisbury, CT, an adult education program much like the LLP, where he has taught Constitutional Law and Documentary Filmmaking.
