This weekend, I went back and I listened to the What Next Archives, specifically a show from October, the opening week of the Supreme Court.

A lot was different back then. No one was talking about a coronavirus for one. But also, Slate's Mark Joseph Stern, He was sounding alarmed, like really alarmed.

This is bad, folks.

This is going to be a really bad term.

This term is going to be a bloodbath for progressives.

It is going to usher in a conservative revolution in jurisprudence that knocks down decades' worth of liberal precedents.

It is going to fundamentally alter the scope and nature of our federal laws and state laws.

It's going to be a wipeout, and I'm terrified.

Fast forward nine months.

The Supreme Court term is all finished up.

And I don't know anyone who's calling what happened to bloodbath. So I called up Mark's colleague

Dolly Lithwick to figure out if we'd gotten things wrong here. Look, objectively, I think we can

agree, and this was, I think, probably animating some of Mark's worry. Nobody seemed to be aware

when the October 2019 term opened what a catastrophic list of cases were on the docket.

Dolly and Mark tag team the Supreme Court coverage here at Slate. I mean, I've been covering the court

for 20 years, and I had never seen a term that was teed up to be every single big ticket item.

We had guns. We had abortion. We had contraception. We had Title VII. We had DACA. There was nothing that wasn't on the docket.

This was after a pretty bland season, where the justices turned down a bunch of hot-button cases.

It really looked as though the apocalypse was nigh because there were no issues that the court wasn't going to tackle.

When the term ended last week, a lot of these cases seem to have progressive outcomes.

The justices protected gay and trans workers from being fired.

They decided not to weigh in on gun rights.

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