Greetings, friends, and welcome to the Bill Press Pod.

Over the years, many people in many different ways have described justices of the Supreme Court,

but, you know, to me they remind me always of college students. For most

of the year, it seems they do absolutely nothing. Then, toward the end of the school year,

at the very last minute, they suddenly get very busy, pull all-nighters, write lots of papers,

whip up two or three weeks of intense activity, and then disappear again for the next 10 months.

So it is with the Supreme Court, which we seldom hear about until the end of their term.

But once we do, it's always fireworks and often with unexpected twists, turns, and changes in direction.

This term, which ended last week of the United States Supreme Court, was no exception,

with a whole string of controversial opinions ranging from abortion to immigration to gay rights

to Native American rights, which today's guest, Adam Liptack,

senior Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, has called a buffet of blockbusters.

Hello, Adam, good to connect with you again.

And you, Bill. Great to be here.

So, you know, to an outsider like me, looking at the court from some distance, even though I live

only about six blocks away, it seems that this term turned out to be a pretty unusual year with an

unusual number of important cases, which we might not have expected, and an unusual number of unexpected partners

in deciding those cases. Is that a correct observation? Yeah, that's the bottom line,

and you're right on both scores. Although the court only decided 53 cases after argument, very

small number, smallest since the Civil War era. They managed

to decide a bunch of very significant cases, including on abortion, gay and transgender rights,

subpoenas for the president's financial records, three big religion cases, a big Native American rights case.

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