While it is too soon for substantive appraisals of the first year of the Roberts court, it is not too soon for stylistic observations about what is clearly, in the view of lawyers who have appeared there this term, a different court.
"The tone has changed," Prof. Richard J. Lazarus of the Georgetown University Law Center, where he runs the Supreme Court Institute and teaches a course on Supreme Court advocacy, said on Tuesday.
In common with every other Supreme Court specialist contacted for this article, Professor Lazarus listed several obvious changes. "They're not stepping on each other," he said of the justices. "They take longer before someone asks the first question. They give the lawyers more time to answer."
Beth S. Brinkmann, like Professor Lazarus a veteran of the solicitor general's office, who now represents private clients before the court, said of the new courtroom experience: "You sit there and think, 'Whoa, isn't anyone going to ask a question?' "
Carter G. Phillips, one of the most active current practitioners, said the change had been so abrupt as to be a trap for an unwary counsel. "You have to be ready now to make some kind of affirmative presentation" in the opening minutes of an argument, he said.
When former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was on the court, he recalled, she asked the first question so quickly and so predictably that there was little point in preparing an elegant opening argument. "Now you might get three or four minutes" without interruption, he said.
The question, of course, is how to explain the change. Even assuming that Justice O'Connor's departure in January accounts for quieter opening moments, a different dynamic seems to prevail throughout entire arguments. With justices sitting back and allowing colleagues to ask follow-up questions, and with lawyers given an actual chance to answer, there is a new coherence and civility to the sessions.
Has Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., himself the veteran of 39 Supreme Court arguments as a lawyer, shared with his colleagues the perspective from the other side of the bench, or maybe even laid down some new rules?
The latter theory is unlikely; the court's ethos calls for signaling rather than rule-making. To the extent that the new chief justice is leading by example — and there is no doubt that he is in charge of the courtroom — he is offering a model of how to ask questions that are tightly phrased, penetrating and often the last thing a lawyer wants to hear.
"Maybe it's because he has so much experience arguing before the court, but he seems to be able to zero in on the weakest point in a case," said Prof. Pamela S. Karlan of Stanford Law School, where she runs the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.
Professor Karlan argued one case this term and sat in on others, noticing to her surprise that justices who inadvertently stepped on another justice's lines held back to allow the colleague to finish, rather than plowing ahead.
Some of the chief justice's questions are deceptively simple. "What is a tributary?" he asked the lawyers in a pair of Clean Water Act cases, seeking a definition that helped to frame the basis of federal jurisdiction. At other times he spins hypothetical questions, difficult to convey out of context; suffice it to say that the traps in these questions are obvious, but the way to avoid them is not.
The chief justice is a more active questioner than his predecessor, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, and his style is quite different.
"Rehnquist told you what he thought," Mr. Phillips said. "He wasn't struggling to figure out the case. Roberts doesn't tip his hand as much. He asks hard questions of both sides without communicating his own preference."
As a result, Mr. Phillips said, the arguments have become less predictive of the eventual decisions. He said he had assumed that he won the chief justice's vote after arguing a case in January on the adequacy of the notice that the State of Arkansas gave to a man whose house it sold for unpaid taxes. The two letters the state sent were enough, Mr. Phillips argued, but Chief Justice Roberts disagreed and last week wrote the court's opinion holding that the state had violated the homeowner's constitutional right to due process.
In another distinction between the Roberts and Rehnquist styles, Chief Justice Roberts is reliably said to be presiding over the justices' private after-argument conferences with a lighter hand, not watching the clock as closely and permitting more conversation.
That might account for the changed tone of the arguments, Ms. Brinkmann speculated. "If you know you'll be able to make your point in conference, you don't have to make it on the bench," she said.
The court has scheduled one final argument for the term on May 18. It is a reargument of a police search case, Hudson v. Michigan, that was argued shortly before Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the court in January. It is safe to assume that without his participation, the court is split 4 to 4.
Despite the disruptions of the term, the court has stayed on track, both in the numbers of opinions issued and new cases accepted. Thirty-nine opinions have been issued so far, typical at this point, with 35 to go. Will most of these come in the familiar helter-skelter June rush, or does Chief Justice Roberts have a trick up his sleeve to make the end of the term as orderly as the rest of it?
Now that would really be something different.