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The Supreme Court opens its new term Monday with a new member, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and a docket that could reshape features of American society ranging from college admissions to political redistricting. Monday’s first case, Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, could offer an early sign of whether the court’s 6-3 conservative majority will continue the refashioning of federal law they pursued last term, with opinions that eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion and expanded religion’s place in public education. (Bravin and Wolfe, 10/2)

The last Supreme Court term ended with a series of judicial bombshells in June that eliminated the right to abortion, established a right to carry guns outside the home and limited efforts to address climate change. As the justices return to the bench on Monday, there are few signs that the court’s race to the right is slowing. The new term will feature major disputes on affirmative action, voting, religion, free speech and gay rights. And the court’s six-justice conservative supermajority seems poised to dominate the new term as it did the earlier one. “On things that matter most,” said Irv Gornstein, the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law, “get ready for a lot of 6-3s.” (Liptak, 10/2)

Speaking at a judges’ conference in Colorado last month, Chief Justice John Roberts sounded exhausted by it all. “The last year was an unusual one and difficult in many respects. It was gut-wrenching every morning to drive into a Supreme Court with barricades around it,” Roberts said. “I think, with my colleagues, we’re all working to move beyond it.” (Gerstein, 10/2)

Last term’s epic decisions might have produced bruised feelings among the justices anyway. But the leak of the abortion decision in early May, seven weeks before it was released, exacerbated tensions on the court, several justices have said. The court has apparently not identified the source of the leak, Justice Stephen Breyer said in a recent interview on CNN. Justice Elena Kagan delivered a series of talks over the summer in which she said the public’s view of the court can be damaged especially when changes in its membership lead to big changes in the law. “It just doesn’t look like law when some new judges appointed by a new president come in and start just tossing out the old stuff,” Kagan said in an appearance last month at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. (Sherman and Gresko, 10/1)