WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama won a series of major cases before the Supreme Court on health care, gay rights, affirmative action and abortion, helping to preserve significant parts of his legacy.
But, over hundreds of cases in eight years, his reception at the court, on the whole, was chilly.
“Barack Obama’s win rate before the Supreme Court is extremely low, lower than any president of this century,” said Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago and an author of a new study on the subject.
On average, presidents win in the Supreme Court about two-thirds of the time. The Obama administration won just 50.5 percent of its cases. That record, the study said, “may be the worst since the Zachary Taylor administration,” which began in 1849.
Supporters of Mr. Obama point out that he faced a generally conservative court inclined to be hostile to his generally liberal policies. His critics say his losing streak was a judicial response to his expansive deployment of executive power.
What seems certain is that Mr. Obama’s record is an outlier. But it is also part of a trend that started after the Reagan administration, which won 75 percent of the time. Each succeeding president did worse than the last. President George Bush won 70 percent of his cases, President Bill Clinton 63 percent and President George W. Bush 60 percent.
“It may be that the Obama administration is just the latest victim of court that has gradually been losing confidence in the executive branch,” the study concluded.
If that is so, President Trump may have no more success in the Supreme Court than his predecessor did.
The core of the new study considered decisions in orally argued cases from 1932 to 2016 in which the federal government, its officials or its agencies were a party. The study also took a preliminary look at all such cases, starting with the administration of George Washington.
Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis and the other author of the study, said a combination of factors probably explained Mr. Obama’s track record. Some of them have nothing to with politics or the separation of powers, she said.
“Scholars have long attributed the success of the executive branch to the quality of its lawyers,” particularly in the solicitor general’s office, which represents the federal government in the Supreme Court, she said. “But the emergence of a specialized Supreme Court bar full of former solicitors general and other government lawyers may be offsetting the president’s traditional advantage.”
Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard who served in the solicitor general’s office and has studied the rise of the private Supreme Court bar, agreed.