The answer: not yet.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was clearly in charge, presiding over the court with grace, wit and meticulous preparation. But he was not in control.
In the court's most significant nonunanimous cases, Chief Justice Roberts was in dissent almost as often as he was in the majority. His goal of inspiring the court to speak softly and unanimously seemed a distant aspiration as important cases failed to produce majority opinions and members of the court, including occasionally the chief justice himself, gave voice to their frustration and pique with colleagues who did not see things their way.
The term's closing weeks were particularly ragged. The court issued no decision in a major patent case that had drawn intense interest from the business community, announcing two months after the argument, over the dissents of three justices, that the case had been "improvidently granted" — they should not have agreed to decide it — in the first place.
So if it wasn't yet the Roberts court, what exactly was it?
Perhaps it was the Kennedy court, based on the frequency with which Justice Anthony M. Kennedy cast the deciding vote in important cases.
Or perhaps it was more accurately seen as the Stevens court, reflecting the ability of John Paul Stevens, the senior associate justice in tenure as well as in age, to deliver a majority in the case for which the term will go down in history, the decision on military commissions that rejected the Bush administration's view of open-ended presidential authority.
Chief Justice Roberts did not participate in that case because he had ruled on it a year earlier as an appeals court judge. Based on his vote to uphold the administration's position then, he almost certainly would have joined Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., the newest member of the court, in dissent.
If none of these labels — Roberts court, Kennedy court, Stevens court — seem to fit precisely, it is probably because what the Supreme Court really was in its 2005-6 term was a court in transition.
For the justices, it was a time of testing, of battles joined and battles, for the moment, postponed.
The term's early period of unanimity, during which cases on such contentious subjects as abortion and federalism were dispatched quickly, with narrowly phrased opinions, reflected agreement not on the underlying legal principles but rather on the desirability of moving on without getting bogged down in a fruitless search for common ground. This was especially so in the term's early months, when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was still sitting but was counting the days until a new justice could take her place.
Once Justice O'Connor retired in late January, after Justice Alito's confirmation, and as the court moved into the heart of the term, some of the court's early inhibitions seemed to fall away. Yet when its most conservative members reached out aggressively to test the boundaries of consensus in the term's major environmental case, Justice Kennedy unexpectedly pushed back and left them well short of their goal.
In that case, Chief Justice Roberts along with Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas tried to cut back on federal regulators' expansive view of their authority under the Clean Water Act to define wetlands.
Justice Kennedy also deserted the conservatives in a redistricting case from Texas when he found a violation of the Voting Rights Act in the dismantling of a Congressional district that had previously had a Mexican-American majority. The action of the Republican-led Texas Legislature had deprived the Latinos of the ability to elect the candidate of their choice, Justice Kennedy said, leaving Chief Justice Roberts to complain in dissent, "It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race."
Nonetheless, there was little doubt that in its transition, the court was becoming more conservative. A statistical analysis by Jason Harrow on the Scotusblog Web site showed that Justice Alito voted with the conservative justices 15 percent more often than Justice O'Connor had.
A separate analysis, by the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, showed that Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts had the highest agreement rate of any two justices in the court's nonunanimous cases, 88 percent, slightly higher than the agreement rate between Justice O'Connor and Justice David H. Souter in the first half of the term, 87.5 percent.
Chief Justice Roberts agreed with Justice Scalia in 77.5 percent of the nonunanimous cases and with Justice Stevens, arguably the court's most liberal member, only 35 percent of the time. The least agreement between any pair of justices was between Justices Alito and Stevens, 23.1 percent.
The court decided 69 cases with signed opinions in the term that began on Oct. 3 and ended on June 29. Nearly half were decided without dissent, a greater number than usual, although not dramatically so. Sixteen cases were decided by five-justice majorities, either 5 to 4 or 5 to 3, a proportion very close to the 10-year average.
One measure of the court's shift to the right is in dissenting votes. In the previous term, the justice who dissented least often was Stephen G. Breyer, who dissented in 10 of the term's 74 decisions. But this term, he had the second-highest number of dissents, 16; Justice Stevens had the most, 19. Justice Thomas and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Souter were also frequent dissenters. Of those who served the full term, Chief Justice Roberts had the fewest dissents, seven. Justice Kennedy had the second fewest, with nine.
Chief Justice Roberts's dissents, while few, came in some important cases. In addition to dissenting from the Voting Rights Act portion of the Texas redistricting decision, he also dissented from a decision reopening a 20-year-old death penalty case on the basis of new evidence; a federalism case, in which the majority found the states not immune from private bankruptcy suits; and a ruling that invalidated the personal assertion of authority by John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, to penalize doctors in Oregon who follow that state's Death With Dignity Act and prescribe lethal doses of medication for terminally ill patients who request it.
The court's next term, which begins Oct. 2, looms as a major test of the justices' fortitude and ability to work together, with cases challenging precedents on abortion and affirmative action already on the docket.
With the court having indicated in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the military commission case, that lawsuits now pending in the lower courts on behalf of dozens of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are still alive, the justices are likely to have further opportunities to address the profound issues of presidential power and judicial authority that these cases raise. This time, the chief justice will not need to stay silent, and the country that is just getting to know him will hear his voice.
Following are summaries of the term's major rulings.
Presidential Power
The court repudiated the Bush administration's plan to use military commissions to try Guantánamo detainees, ruling 5 to 3 that the commissions were unauthorized by statute and violated a provision of the Geneva Conventions.
The majority opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, No. 05-184, by Justice Stevens, set minimum procedural protections that any future commissions, even those authorized by Congress, would have to provide. Justices Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer joined the opinion. Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito dissented. Chief Justice Roberts, who had voted as an appeals court judge to uphold the commissions, did not participate.
Elections
A splintered decision rejected a challenge to the Republican-driven mid-decade redistricting of Texas's Congressional map, finding that it was not an impermissible partisan gerrymander. Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, No. 05-204. Agreeing with the judgment on the gerrymander challenge were Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas. Justices Stevens and Breyer dissented. Justices Souter and Ginsburg expressed no view on the issue, making the vote 5 to 2 to 2.
In the same case, the court ruled that the dismantling of a district in southwestern Texas with a Latino majority, an action the State Legislature had taken to shore up the faltering prospects of the Republican incumbent, violated the Voting Rights Act. On this question, Justice Kennedy spoke for a 5-to-4 majority that included Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer.
The court voted 6 to 3 to strike down Vermont's campaign finance law, which both limited the amount that candidates could spend on their own campaigns and placed the country's lowest ceilings on contributions to candidates from individuals and political parties.
The fragmented majority did not offer a unified approach to contribution limits, leaving the court's path in this area uncertain. Justice Breyer wrote the controlling opinion in the case, Randall v. Sorrell, No. 04-1528, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. Justices Kennedy, Thomas and Scalia joined the judgment.
Criminal Law
In Georgia v. Randolph, No. 04-1067, the court held that when the police lack a search warrant, they cannot enter a home if one occupant objects, even if another occupant gives permission. The vote was 5 to 3, with Justice Alito not participating. In his majority opinion, Justice Souter said the decision comported with "widely shared social expectations" about privacy in the home. Chief Justice Roberts filed his first dissenting opinion in this case. Justices Scalia and Thomas also voted in dissent.
The court ruled that evidence the police find when they search a home to execute a search warrant can be admitted in court despite an officer's failure to observe the constitutional requirement to "knock and announce" before entering. Justice Scalia, writing for the 5-to-4 majority, said the ordinary rule against admitting unconstitutionally obtained evidence should not apply in this circumstance — nor, he implied, in many other circumstances currently governed by the "exclusionary rule."
This case, Hudson v. Michigan, No. 04-1360, was argued for a second time after Justice Alito joined the court; his vote with the majority determined the outcome. The others in the majority were Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas and Kennedy.
The court was unanimous in ruling that inmates facing execution by lethal injection can invoke a federal civil rights law to challenge the state's choice of drugs and the manner in which they are administered. The decision, Hill v. McDonough, No. 05-8794, opened the door to lawsuits that would be prohibited by tight restrictions on petitions for habeas corpus. Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion.
The court ruled 5 to 3 that new evidence in a Tennessee murder case, including DNA evidence, sufficiently undermined the prosecution's theory of the case to require a new federal court hearing for the man who was convicted and sentenced to death for the crime 21 years ago.
The case, House v. Bell, No. 04-8990, was the first in which the court factored the results of modern DNA testing into consideration of whether a prisoner might qualify for a chance at habeas corpus that would otherwise be prohibited by procedural obstacles. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority. Chief Justice Roberts dissented, along with Justices Scalia and Thomas. Justice Alito did not participate.
The court ruled 6 to 3 that foreign criminal defendants who have not been notified of their right under an international treaty to contact one of their country's diplomats are not entitled to special accommodation from courts in the United States. The decision, Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, No. 04-10566, rejected claims brought under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by foreign citizens convicted in Oregon and Virginia. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority. Justices Breyer, Stevens and Souter dissented.
In a unanimous opinion, the court ordered a new trial for an inmate on South Carolina's death row on the ground that an evidentiary rule used in that state's courts had prevented the inmate from putting on a complete defense. Justice Alito, writing his first opinion for the court, said the rule was irrational and arbitrary. The case was Holmes v. South Carolina, No. 04-1327.
The court was deeply split on a basic question of death penalty law: the validity of the death penalty statute in Kansas under which a death sentence is automatic if the jury finds that the mitigating evidence and aggravating evidence are of equal weight. Voting 5 to 4 in an opinion by Justice Thomas, the court upheld the law, which the State Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional. Justice Alito's vote, following a reargument after he joined the court, made the difference. Justices Souter, Stevens, Ginsburg and Breyer dissented in the case, Kansas v. Marsh, No. 04-1170.
The court considered defendants' rights to cross-examine the state's witnesses, a right protected by the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment, in a pair of cases that were decided in a single opinion by Justice Scalia.
In the first part of the opinion in Davis v. Washington, No. 05-5224, the court was unanimous in ruling that a crime victim's emergency telephone call to 911 can be introduced as evidence at trial, even if the victim is not present for cross-examination, because a call to 911 does not produce the kind of "testimonial statement" to which the Confrontation Clause is addressed.
The court then went on to hold, by a vote of 8 to 1, with Justice Thomas dissenting, that a crime victim's statement to police officers who arrive at a scene should be considered "testimonial" if the police are investigating the crime rather than providing emergency assistance. Such a statement should therefore be banned from the trial if the person who gave it is not available for cross-examination, Justice Scalia said.
In another Sixth Amendment case, on the right to the assistance of counsel, the court ruled 5 to 4 that defendants who are wrongly deprived of the right to hire a lawyer of their choice are entitled to have a conviction overturned without the need to show that the first-choice lawyer would have achieved a better result. Justice Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, United States v. Gonzalez-Lopez, No. 05-352, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer.
Government Authority
The court ruled 6 to 3 that John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, acted without legal authority when he declared that doctors in Oregon who followed the procedures of that state's Death With Dignity Act to help patients commit suicide would lose their federal prescription rights and thus forfeit, as a practical matter, their ability to practice medicine.
No statute authorized the attorney general to take such action unilaterally contrary to "the background principles of our federal system," Justice Kennedy said in the majority opinion. The decision, Gonzales v. Oregon, No. 04-623, was a rebuff of the Bush administration, which had embraced Mr. Ashcroft's personal fight against assisted suicide and carried on the case after he left the government.
Chief Justice Roberts joined a dissenting opinion written by Justice Scalia. Justice Thomas also dissented. Justice Alito was not yet on the court when the case was decided, with Justice O'Connor in the majority, on January 17.
A pair of decisions on the question of state immunity from suit, also issued in January, before Justice Alito joined the court, gave strong indications that the Rehnquist court's federalism battles were far from over.
The court was unanimous in permitting a disabled Georgia prison inmate's lawsuit against the state to go forward under the Americans With Disabilities Act. But the unanimity was achieved only because the court limited the decision, Goodman v. Georgia, No. 04-1203, to little more than the statement of a truism: that Congress has the power to make the states liable to lawsuit when they violate the Constitution.
In this case, the inmate claimed that his mistreatment had been so egregious as to violate not only the disabilities law, but also the Constitution. Justice Scalia's opinion said that to this extent, the lawsuit could proceed.
In the second decision, the court split 5 to 4 in ruling that states are not immune from private lawsuits brought under federal bankruptcy law. Justice O'Connor joined the majority opinion by Justice Stevens in this case, Central Virginia Community College v. Katz, No. 04-885. The dissenters were Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas, who wrote the dissenting opinion supporting state immunity.
The court ruled that as a matter of constitutional due process, the government must take reasonable steps to make sure that homeowners have been notified before it sells a house for nonpayment of taxes. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the 5-to-3 majority in this case, Jones v. Flowers, No. 04-1477. Justices Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy dissented, and Justice Alito did not participate.
The justices ruled 7 to 1 that the Postal Service may be sued by people who trip over packages that letter carriers have carelessly left in their path. The majority opinion by Justice Kennedy in this case, Dolan v. United States Postal Service, No. 04-848, was based on an interpretation of the Federal Tort Claims Act, not on the Constitution. Justice Thomas dissented, and Justice Alito did not participate.
Environment
A fractured decision in the term's major environmental case, defining federal jurisdiction over wetlands in the Clean Water Act, did not produce a majority opinion but did retain the ability of the government to continue enforcing the 1972 statute vigorously.
The court split 4 to 1 to 4 in the case, Rapanos v. United States, No. 04-1034, with Justice Kennedy in the middle. One group of four — Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito, and Chief Justice Roberts — denounced federal regulators' open-ended approach to wetlands as "beyond parody" and would have redefined the term to land adjacent to open water and actually wet most of the time.
The other foursome, Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer, would have deferred to the longstanding judgment of the Army Corps of Engineers that a "wetland" can often appear dry and can be miles from a body of water, as long as it sometimes performs a filtering or runoff-control function. Justice Kennedy voted with the first group to send the case back to a lower court, but he proposed a standard much closer to that of the Stevens group.
In a second case under the Clean Water Act, the court ruled unanimously that operators of hydroelectric dams must meet a state's water quality requirements to qualify for a federal license. Justice Souter wrote the opinion in this case, S. D. Warren Company v. Maine Board of Environmental Protection, No. 04-1527.
Religion
In a significant application of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the court ruled 8 to 0 that a small religious sect based in Brazil has the right to import a hallucinogenic tea that the federal government had wanted to seize as a banned narcotic.
The tea, known as hoasca, is central to the sect's rituals, Chief Justice Roberts noted in his opinion for the court. He said the government had not met the religious freedom act's demanding standard for applying a generally applicable law — federal narcotics law, in this instance — in a way that impinges on religious observance. Justice Alito did not participate in the case, Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal, No. 04-1084.
Education
Voting 8 to 0, the court upheld a federal law that requires universities to forfeit all federal financing if any part of the university does not provide military recruiters with the same access to students as it provides other potential employers.
The law, known as the Solomon Amendment, was challenged by a coalition of law schools that objected to the military's exclusion of openly gay men and women. The law schools argued that their First Amendment rights to free speech and association had been violated by the requirement that they open their doors to military recruiters.
Writing for the court in this case, Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, No. 04-1152, Chief Justice Roberts said the speech in question was that of the government, not of the law schools, which he noted remained free to criticize the military and to express their views on its policies. Justice Alito did not participate.
The court ruled 6 to 2 that parents who disagree with a public school system's special-education plan for their children have the legal burden of proving that the plan will fail to provide the "appropriate" education that a federal law guarantees to children with disabilities. Justice O'Connor wrote the decision in the case, Schaffer v. Weast, No. 04-698. Chief Justice Roberts did not participate, and Justice Alito was not yet on the court.
Separately, the court ruled 6 to 3 that parents who prevail at a special-education hearing are not entitled to reimbursement for the cost of hiring expert witnesses. Justice Alito wrote this opinion, Arlington Central School District v. Murphy, No. 05-18. Justices Souter, Breyer and Stevens dissented.
Employees' Rights
The court gave employees substantially enhanced protection against retaliation for complaining about discrimination on the job. Justice Breyer wrote the opinion in the case, Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Company v. White, No. 05-259, which interpreted the anti-retaliation provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The court defined retaliation broadly as any "materially adverse" employment action that "might have dissuaded a reasonable worker" from making the complaint. Eight justices joined the majority opinion, and Justice Alito filed a separate concurring opinion.
Addressing the free-speech rights of government workers, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the Constitution does not protect public employees against retaliation for what they say in the course of performing their assigned duties.
Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in this case, Garcetti v. Ceballos, No. 04-473, drew a distinction between public employees' official speech, which he said supervisors were entitled to control, and their speech as citizens contributing to "civic discourse," for which they retained constitutional protection. The dissenters were Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer and Ginsburg.
Abortion
The justices papered over, at least for this term, their fundamental differences on abortion, ruling narrowly and unanimously in a case from New Hampshire on access to abortion for teenagers facing medical emergencies. In an opinion by Justice O'Connor, her last before leaving the bench, the court reaffirmed that a medical-emergency exception was constitutionally required in a law that placed obstacles, like a parental-notice requirement and a waiting period, in the path of teenagers seeking abortions.
The more difficult question in the case, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, No. 04-1144, was that of what to do about New Hampshire's failure to include such an exception in its parental notice law. The justices sent the case back to the federal appeals court in Boston, which had banned enforcement of the law in its entirety, even for teenagers not facing a medical emergency.
That "most blunt remedy" would be justified, Justice O'Connor said, only if it was clear that New Hampshire's legislature, which enacted the law in 2003, would have preferred no law at all to one with the necessary health exception. Otherwise, she said, the appeals court should come up with a more limited remedy for the constitutional problem.
Patents
Indicating new interest in intellectual property law, the justices considered several patent cases but failed to offer much guidance in this burgeoning legal area.
The court handed a limited victory to eBay in its patent dispute with MercExchange, which successfully sued eBay for patent infringement on the method behind the online auction company's "Buy It Now" feature. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has sole jurisdiction over patent appeals, then granted an injunction against eBay's use of the technology, under the view that an injunction should automatically follow a finding of infringement.
In a unanimous opinion by Justice Thomas, the justices instructed the appeals court to make a case-by-case determination rather than apply an automatic injunction rule. But the opinion, eBay v. MercExchange, No. 05-130, left it unclear what presumptions and factors should go into that determination, and it was evident that the justices themselves had not agreed on a standard.