A new SCOTUSblog series, built around five editions of the editors' casebook, examines how the Supreme Court's constitutional doctrine has shifted over two decades. The first installment notes that a lawyer who studied constitutional law in spring 2005 would have learned four propositions that no longer hold: a constitutional right to abortion, race-conscious university admissions, the Lemon test for religious establishment, and limits on the president's power to remove independent agency officials. None of those statements accurately describes the law today.
The series attributes the transformation to a rapid turnover in the Court's membership. After the Rehnquist Court's stable run from 1994 to 2005, four new justices joined within five years, and four more arrived between 2016 and 2022. That shift produced major rulings: Dobbs overruled Roe and Casey, Students for Fair Admissions ended affirmative action, and the Court reshaped religion-clause doctrine, Second Amendment precedent, and presidential immunity. The editors also point to a wave of Trump-specific cases, including one expanding presidential immunity and another invalidating a birthright citizenship order.
Yet the series emphasizes continuity as much as change. The editors say their syllabus was about 90% the same in 2024 as in 2019, and they expect that figure to drop to roughly 80% after the 2025-26 term. The foundational canon—Marbury, McCulloch, Gibbons, and the Civil War-era cases—remains largely untouched across all five editions. The source is a single SCOTUSblog post, so there are no conflicting accounts; the article itself frames the stability of the early canon as a counterweight to the recent doctrinal upheaval.