Less consequential cases seemed to produce consensus. According to data from Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, the percentage of cases decided by a 5-to-4 or a 5-to-3 vote was 14 percent, compared with an average since 1946 of 22 percent.

Professor Epstein also devised another measure of consensus, dividing the number of votes in support of the majority or plurality opinion by the total number of votes cast. The last term’s rate, 89 percent, was the highest in at least 70 years.

“This term showed that there is broad agreement across ideological lines, sometimes surprisingly broad, on some important areas of the law,” said William M. Jay, a lawyer with Goodwin Procter. For instance, he said, “the court continues to read the First Amendment to provide robust protection for free speech, even for unpopular speech or unpopular citizens.”

There were, of course, major decisions that revealed deep divisions. One of them, Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, lowered the wall between church and state by a 7-to-2 vote.

“This case is about nothing less than the relationship between religious institutions and the civil government — that is, between church and state,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “The court today profoundly changes that relationship by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church.”

In Ziglar v. Abbasi, the court ruled by a 4-to-2 vote that high-level officials in President George W. Bush’s administration could not be sued for abuses they were accused of committing after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In his dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer likened the decision to the Supreme Court’s “refusal to set aside the government’s World War II action removing more than 70,000 American citizens of Japanese origin from their West Coast homes and interning them in camps” in Korematsu v. United States.