WASHINGTON — It was February, and Justice Antonin Scalia had just died. Responding to a question about how the Supreme Court would cope with just eight members, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was sanguine. “We will deal with it,” he said.

Now it is April, and it is possible to start to assess how a short-handed court is dealing with its work.

It has started to deadlock in closely divided cases. That happened twice last month, in a minor case on bank guarantees and a major one on public unions.

“With almost 50 cases still on the docket for the term, the Supreme Court could set a record for most tie votes,” said Justin Pidot, a law professor at the University of Denver and the author of a study of Supreme Court deadlocks to be published in the Minnesota Law Review. “No term since 1990 has included more than two tie votes, a benchmark the court has now hit in a single week.”