Since Scalia’s death, one rule of Supreme Court practice has dominated the deliberations of the eight remaining Justices. When the Court splits four to four, the lower-court decision is affirmed, but the Justices don’t write an opinion and the ruling does not represent a national precedent. This meant that if the four Democratic appointees voted in lockstep—as they already tended to do in controversial cases—they would not necessarily win every case, but they couldn’t lose, either. The liberals could always prevent the establishment of a new Court precedent not to their liking.

As Carrie Severino, the chief counsel of the right-leaning Judicial Crisis Network, put it, “Losing Justice Scalia on the Court created a one-way ratchet, making it so much easier to move in a liberal direction. Every time Kennedy joined the conservatives, there was just a tie, and no real precedent was made. But when Kennedy joined the liberals they could set binding precedent.”

Because Kennedy in recent years had appeared to weaken in his support for abortion rights, the case had initially seemed like a possible vehicle for the conservatives to impose severe limits on the rights guaranteed to all women by the Court in Roe v. Wade. But Scalia’s death reversed the odds. Texas’s abortion restrictions had been upheld by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the most conservative circuit in the country, and a tie would affirm the ruling—but only in that region.

So when the liberal Justices entered the courtroom on March 2nd they did so confidently. Scott Keller, the Texas solicitor general, opened his remarks by pointing out that most of the state’s big cities still had abortion clinics. Ginsburg pounced, asking, “Well, how many women are located over a hundred miles from the nearest clinic?” About a quarter of the women in the state, Keller said, adding that clinics in New Mexico were also available to Texas women. “That’s odd that you point to the New Mexico facility,” Ginsburg replied. New Mexico imposed none of the requirements that Texas had established. “If that’s all right for the women in the El Paso area, why isn’t it right for the rest of the women in Texas?” she asked.

The Justices often ask lawyers challenging questions, but the liberals, in a rare departure, took control of the courtroom. The Chief Justice manages the arguments and decides when the questioning of lawyers must cease. John Roberts is less of a stickler for protocol than his predecessor, William Rehnquist, but in the Texas case Sotomayor talked over him when he tried to stop Stephanie Toti, the lawyer representing the Texas clinics. And, when Toti wanted to elaborate on an answer after her time had expired, it was Ginsburg who suggested that she be allowed to continue. Roberts meekly acceded. In tone and in substance, the liberals were sending the message that they were in charge.

The legal world took note. Just after Scalia’s death, Dow Chemical announced that it would settle an antitrust case against the company for eight hundred million dollars. Liberals are known to be sympathetic to antitrust plaintiffs, so Dow decided not to chance an appeal before the Justices. On March 4th, the Justices met in their regular Friday conference to cast their preliminary votes in the Texas abortion case. The result would not be released until the end of the term, in June, but the Court gave a clear hint where it was heading. It overruled the Fifth Circuit in a different case and blocked the implementation of a Louisiana law that would have forced all but one of the state’s abortion clinics to close. In another ruling issued that week, the Court rejected a request from Michigan and other mostly Republican-led states to stay a new E.P.A. regulation that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants. The legal issue was not identical to the one in the climate-change regulation, which the Court had just stopped, but the cases were close enough to highlight the contrast. With five votes, the conservatives could block the Obama E.P.A.; with just four, less than a month later, they couldn’t.

Under ordinary circumstances, President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace Scalia, which the President announced on March 16th, might have aroused little controversy. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Garland served as a law clerk for William J. Brennan, Jr., the liberal lion of the Supreme Court, but Garland’s trajectory has reflected technocratic excellence rather than ideological passion. He worked in private practice and as a prosecutor, and, as a Justice Department official in the Clinton Administration, he supervised the prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombers. In 1997, Bill Clinton nominated him to the D.C. Circuit, where he earned a reputation as moderately left of center but hardly controversial.

As a Democratic President’s choice for the Supreme Court, Garland had much to commend him to Republicans. In nearly two decades on a generally conservative court, he had rarely protested his colleagues’ rulings, writing, on average, less than one dissenting opinion a year. And Garland was already sixty-three, meaning that his career was likely to be shorter than those of most Justices on the Supreme Court.

It was possible to see Obama’s nomination of Garland as a kind of peace offering to McConnell. If that was the theory, the gambit failed. Some Republicans agreed to conduct the traditional courtesy meetings with the nominee, but none suggested that Garland deserved a confirmation hearing, much less an up-or-down vote. Because the majority party controls the agenda in the Senate, the President was powerless to do more than protest.

Still, it became apparent in the spring that Obama, and the liberal quartet on the Supreme Court, would begin to reap the benefits of seven years of Obama’s lower-court appointments. This success owed as much to Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, as to the President. While Reid was Majority Leader, especially in the period before the 2014 midterm elections, he put judicial confirmations at the top of his agenda. Faced with Republican filibusters, he and his fellow-Democrats deployed the so-called “nuclear option,” rewriting the Senate rules so that lower-court judges could be confirmed by a simple majority vote. Once McConnell took over as Majority Leader, he all but ceased allowing votes on Obama’s judicial nominees (not just for the Supreme Court), but by that point Reid had enabled Obama to remake the federal judiciary. Obama has appointed three hundred and twenty-nine federal judges, more than a third of the total. They include two on the Supreme Court, fifty-five on the courts of appeals, two hundred and sixty-eight on the district courts, and four on the Court of International Trade. (Obama’s totals are roughly in line with those of his predecessors: George W. Bush appointed three hundred and twenty-four judges, and Bill Clinton appointed three hundred and seventy-two.) More to the point, Democratic appointees now dominate most of the courts of appeals. When Obama took office, only three of the thirteen appellate courts had more Democrat-appointed judges than Republican-appointed judges. Now nine do. This means that more cases come to the Supreme Court after liberals have prevailed in the courts of appeals.

That’s what happened with Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which concerned the efforts of public-employee labor unions to collect fees from non-members. Undermining the financial viability of unions, which generally support Democratic candidates, has long been a conservative cause; on the Supreme Court, it is most closely associated with Samuel Alito. The Friedrichs case was argued in January, while Scalia was still on the Court, and the five conservatives seemed poised to deliver a victory. But, with Scalia gone, the Court split, and, because liberal judges had prevailed in the Ninth Circuit, the status quo favoring union rights remained intact. As Noah Feldman observed, “There has been a sense of empowerment among liberals on a whole bunch of appellate courts, in which Obama has appointed a majority of the judges. They know that if their cases go to the Supreme Court they will be protected by four-to-four votes.”

The one big liberal disappointment of the post-Scalia era also involved a four-four vote. After Congress failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform, early in Obama’s second term, the President issued an executive order to allow nearly four million unauthorized immigrants who were the parents of citizens or of lawful permanent residents to apply for a program that would spare them from deportation and provide them with work permits. Texas and other states challenged Obama’s action as an abuse of his powers under the Constitution, and a panel of the Fifth Circuit, by a vote of two to one, sided with the challengers. As is customary with tie votes, the Court’s opinion was just nine words: “The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court.” The millions who might have benefitted from Obama’s order returned to a state of legal limbo.

As the term came to a close, two significant cases, both of which originated in Texas, remained unresolved. The first was Hellerstedt, the challenge to the state’s restrictive abortion law, and the other was Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which represented the Court’s latest chance to address affirmative action in college admissions. In that case, which the Court was hearing for the second time, a white student was challenging her rejection by the state’s flagship university, which used race as a factor in weighing whether to admit a student. Both cases illustrated that, for the time being, at least, Anthony Kennedy remained the swing vote, and thus the pivotal figure on the Court.