What to make of the Supreme Court’s tumultuous term

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”.