Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

Once Again, the Most Important Supreme Court Term Ever

“Momentous” has been used repeatedly for more than a century to describe each new session as justices weigh issues that resonate in their time.

October 17, 2021 at 12:00 PM UTC

By Stephen L. Carter

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

Making important judgments.
Photographer: Erin Schaff/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

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With the first Monday in October behind us, perhaps we can at last put to rest the refrain about how the current term of the U.S. Supreme Court is among the most momentous in history. The court’s terms are like presidential elections: Always, history has never seen one as important as the one coming up. But the wordsmith in me is aware that the rhetoric we use when discussing the Supreme Court and its work has scarcely changed in more than a century.

In the summer of 1962, for example, the Los Angeles Times wrote that the justices had just ended “their most important term of court in a quarter of a century.” Why a quarter century? Maybe because exactly 25 years earlier, in 1937, the Associated Press had declared the year just past to be “one of the most momentous terms in supreme court history.”