When Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the upcoming US supreme court season would be “momentous”, the celebrated liberal justice probably didn’t mean it as a good thing.

With the addition to the bench of Trump’s nominee Neil Gorsuch, and a broad swath of ideological cases on the docket, conservatives hope the supreme court is on the brink of a banner year.

Gorsuch will be another conservative voice on the court, continuing the trend of recent years, and once again, moderate justice Anthony Kennedy – Gorsuch’s former mentor – will be the key swing vote.

The court opens on Monday with consideration of worker class-actions lawsuits, and on Tuesday justices will consider political gerrymandering of election districts, the biggest case of its kind in more than a decade. Meanwhile a case out of Ohio seeks to legalize voter purging, and a cake maker’s objection to gay marriage in Colorado will come under the microscope.

And another closely watched one out of Illinois could financially undermine public-sector unions in 22 states, with knock-on effects for the Democratic party.

Kennedy is rumored to be retiring soon. And given a president at war with the judiciary, some fear his departure could lead to a boost in the powers of the executive branch.

For now, with a few key exceptions, this term could be decided by a single justice.

Organized labor

A labor union march and rally crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City in September. Photograph: Erik Pendzich/Rex/Shutterstock

On Thursday the court announced a new spate of cases, including one that could financially cripple public-sector unions – and this time it’s Gorsuch who’ll probably deliver the blow.

Unions were granted a brief reprieve from such an outcome in a similar case last year, when the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia left the court deadlocked. Now the like-minded Gorsuch is expected to deliver the fifth vote to a conservative majority.

The case out of Illinois mounts a challenge to unions’ requirement that non-members pay what unions call “fair-share” fees for the protections enjoyed courtesy of others’ membership. The plaintiff, a government worker in Illinois, objects to having to pay the fee, arguing it amounts to being forced to subsidize politics anathema to him in violation of the first amendment.

A victory for the plaintiff could prove devastating for organized labor nationwide, eliminating a major source of revenue for public-sector unions in nearly two dozen states where the fees are currently authorized by law, including in the economic powerhouse of California.

It would also add to a decades-long decline in the power of organized labor.

Still, the president of the National Constitution Center, Jeffrey Rosen, cautioned against extrapolating too much from Gorsuch’s voting record generally speaking – and particularly when it comes other issues coming before the court, like digital privacy. “It’s an entirely new court when a new justice joins,” he said.

Gerrymandering

Voters in Santa Monica, California, cast there vote in the 2016 US presidential election. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

Among the highest-profile cases will come on Tuesday when the court hears Gill v Whitford, a challenge out of Wisconsin calling into question the standards under which political districts are drawn. Rosen said: “This could be the most important case involving the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering in a long time.”

How should district lines be drawn and when do efforts to redraw them go too far to help incumbent parties? Although the court has struck down racially motivated gerrymanders in the past, and despite landmark cases in 1962, 1986 and 2004, no clear standard has been enacted and to date, no election map has been rejected as a purely partisan gerrymander.

Back in 2004, it was Kennedy who staked out the court’s middle ground, agreeing with liberals that the court should continue to hear these cases but also agreeing with conservatives that there was no good standard to separate permissible from impermissible considerations of party. Since then improvements in data technology have made it possible to draw even more effective gerrymanders, increasing the advantage for incumbent parties and perhaps – some reformers dare to hope – Kennedy’s willingness to try to rein gerrymandering in.

“There aren’t necessarily tea leaves to suggest that Justice Kennedy is ready to start policing gerrymandering,” said Richard Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and curator of the Election Law Blog. “But that’s what everyone’s waiting to see.”

Voter purging

People in New York protest againstDonald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election. Voter purging cases overwhelming benefit Republicans. Photograph: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images

Husted v A Philip Randolph Institute looks at how voters are purged from the rolls, a hyper-partisan battle that Democrats have been fighting, and largely losing, for years. Under the voter purging method coming before the court, voters who haven’t voted in two years are sent a postcard in the mail. If they don’t respond within a given timeframe, they get deregistered.

Such moves have notably attracted the backing of the Trump administration, as part of a broader campaign to restrict who is eligible to vote. In August, Trump’s Department of Justice switched its longheld position on the matter, citing “a change in administration” as the reason. “For there to be a change in the middle of a case,” Hasen said, is “something that’s pretty unusual.”

Voter purging cases, which overwhelming benefit Republicans, may seem transparent in their political bent. But that has not discouraged the Trump administration from trying to lend voter suppression efforts the imprimatur of credibility by creating the White House’s Election Integrity Commission. Its mission, according to the White House, is to root out voting fraud. According to just about every close observer, its aim is actually to overstate evidence of fraud, which is extremely rare.

Another case on purging methods out of Texas, currently wending its way through lower courts, is also expected to eventually come before the Scotus. Such cases are of mounting importance at a time when voter suppression efforts are ascendant, and in the wake of the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which dealt a significant blow to the Voting Rights Act.

LGBT discrimination

A same-sex wedding cake in West Hollywood, California. The upcoming case concerns a cake shop in Colorado. Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

One of the most-discussed upcoming cases, Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission, is about much more than cake. At issue is whether a Colorado cake artist can legally refuse to make a cake to celebrate a gay couple’s wedding. Coming on the heels of the court’s same-sex marriage victory in 2015, the ruling could determine nothing less than how religious freedom debates take shape and how far LGBT rights will be understood to extend.

The heart of the Christian baker’s defense stems from the notion that making a cake for a gay wedding would be a violation of his faith and his right to free artistic expression. As Jeremy Tedesco of the Alliance Defending Freedom put it to a local paper, couples spend extravagant amounts of money on wedding cakes “not because a particular baker uses the best eggs or milk. They’re paying for a person’s artistic talents and expressive ability.”

But what happens when your beliefs and expression are prejudiced? At a time when so much has been made of first amendment rights, what happens when protections of faith and free expression run afoul of anti-discrimination laws is a question of great salience.

Immigration detention

The Department of Homeland Security acting secretary, Elaine Duke, outside the West Wing of the White House. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A critical case slated to land before the court on Tuesday revolves around immigrants’ right to due process in deportation proceedings and long-term detention. The Department of Homeland Security currently claims it may hold people indefinitely as they defend their right to remain in the United States, despite the fact that many affected are lawful residents who will go on to win their cases.

Jennings v Rodriguez holds that the government’s practice of detaining immigrants for months or years ahead of deportation proceedings without so much as a hearing to assess whether their imprisonment is even warranted is unconstitutional. The case has new urgency at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is central to the White House worldview, and especially given Trump’s recent rollback of Obama-era protections for young undocumented immigrants, a move that leaves some 800,000 young adults newly vulnerable to deportation.

Travel ban

Seeking to limit visitors, immigrants and refugees from multiple countries, the travel ban is testing presidential power. Photograph: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AFP/Getty Images

The greatest political flashpoint of the term, a ruling on Trump’s travel ban, was postponed last week when the high court abruptly announced it was canceling oral arguments after the administration set out a new version of the ban, drawing in more countries. The court asked for updated briefings from both sides. The legal case testing the limits of presidential power would have provided a definitive ruling on the question of whether Trump violated constitutional protections on religious freedom when he sought to implement his ban.



The case would have provided a potent political test of Gorsuch, in particular, who undermined perceptions of his own impartiality last week by giving a speech at Trump Hotel, despite questions regarding the constitutionality of Trump’s ownership of the property. Meanwhile Trump’s travel ban, which many civil rights lawyers argue is discriminatory, will languish longer in lower courts. But ultimately, Rosen said, “It will be up to the lower courts and the way the case develops to determine whether they can avoid it a second time.”

