From KQED.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Grace Wan in Formina Kim.

How powerful should a president be?

That's the question at the heart of the Supreme Court's new docket.

This term, the court will weigh in on Trump's right to levy tariffs to the right to fire whomever he pleases.

Also in play, transgender rights, campaign finance, and a case

that could gut the Seminole Voting Rights Act. Public opinion of the court is on a downward trend,

and the question is, will the court's conservative-leaning justices be able to maintain the nation's

trust? And how will these cases impact us? Here to help sort all of this out we have with us this

morning, Mark Joseph Stern. He's a senior writer for Slate and a co-host of the Amicus podcast. Welcome, Mark.

Thank you so much for having me on. Yeah, and we've got Olatande Johnson. She's a law professor

at Columbia Law School who holds the Ruth Bader Ginsburg chair. Welcome, Olete.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. And we have Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU Law School and also co-host of the podcast Strict Scrutiny. Welcome, Melissa.

Thanks for having me. Melissa, I wanted to start with you. The court's new term started this Monday, but in many ways,

it has felt like the court never stopped working throughout the summer. The court kept issuing

various rulings on what is called the shadow docket, which is the court's emergency docket.

Can you tell us what the court was working on and what some of those rulings that it made were over

the summer?

Yes, Grace. You're exactly right. The court's work has not stopped. It's been a constant flood of decisions even after the formal merits docket term ended at the end of June. And most of this

activity has largely concerned the court weighing in on emergency appeals dealing with the various

actions that the Trump administration has taken since taking office in January of 2025.

So I think it's almost fair to call the shadow docket, not just the emergency docket,

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