For the second year in a row, the Supreme Court docket is dominated by cases in which the federal government is a named party, marking an unprecedented shift in the kinds of disputes the justices are choosing to hear.
Of the 62 cases the court has granted for its 2024-25 term, 31 involve the federal government as either a petitioner or respondent, according to data compiled by Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck and Juris Doctor candidate Alyssa Negvesky.
This marks only the second time ever that cases involving the federal government have accounted for at least half of the court’s merits docket — the first was last term in 2023-24, Vladeck explained in his Substack blog One First on Monday.
While the U.S. government has long been the most frequent litigant before the court, it traditionally accounted for only a plurality of cases, not a majority.
This pattern over the last two terms signals a trend for how federal policy disputes are resolved, shifting further from Congress and regulatory agencies into the judiciary.
Vladeck wrote that this trend also could represent why the Supreme Court often divides along ideological lines on some of the more contentious cases it weighs each term. Thanks to President Donald Trump‘s three appointees during his first term, the high court is made up of six Republican-appointed and three Democratic-appointed justices.
“For better or worse, that shift necessarily puts the justices not only on the front lines of the culture wars in a growing number (and even larger percentage) of cases, but often in contexts in which they are more likely to divide along ideological lines than in the cases that comprised more of the merits docket a generation ago,” Vladeck said.
The Supreme Court’s expanding role in federal power disputes
The high number of cases involving the federal government this term reflects a broader legal landscape in which more disputes between private parties and the federal government, or between states and federal agencies, are escalating to the Supreme Court. This shift has coincided with the court’s increasing focus on administrative power, a theme that defined the 2023-24 term and continues into the new session as more of a look at some of the larger culture war issues of the current era.
During the last term, the court’s Republican-appointed majority issued rulings that significantly curtailed federal regulatory authority. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the justices overturned the decades-old Chevron doctrine, stripping agencies of their ability to interpret ambiguous federal laws without judicial second-guessing.
In another example highlighting the focus on administrative law last term, SEC v. Jarkesy, the Supreme Court ruled that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s practice of seeking civil penalties through its own administrative proceedings violated the Seventh Amendment’s guarantee of a jury trial. This decision limits the SEC’s ability to impose penalties without going through federal courts, thereby reducing the agency’s enforcement power.
Pivoting to the broader culture war issues
Meanwhile, the court is set to decide a landmark case later this year known as Skrmetti v. United States, a challenge to Tennessee’s ban on transgender medical treatments for minors, which reached the justices after the Biden administration intervened to argue the law was unconstitutional.
Another major case this term highlighting the federal government’s central role in Supreme Court litigation is Garland v. VanDerStok, in which the Biden administration is defending the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives’s regulation of so-called ghost guns — unserialized, privately assembled firearms. The case, which stems from a lower court ruling that struck down the regulation, will test the federal government’s ability to impose gun control measures through agency rulemaking.
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Additionally, the court agreed on Monday to hear Martin v. City of Boise, a case that will determine whether citizens can sue police officers for wrongful SWAT raids, adding another significant case to the court’s growing list of rulings with broad civil rights implications.
With two consecutive terms of Supreme Court dockets in which half of the cases involve the federal government and all other litigants, the court’s position at the center of governance disputes has never been clearer, though whether the trend holds up in future terms remains an open question.
