The Supreme Court made a wave of historic and game-changing decisions in 2024 on topics ranging from presidential immunity to social media and ballot disqualification.

The presidential election combined with rising administrative law disputes helped tee up controversies that put the court and its decisions in the spotlight. Legal precedent flowing from those decisions created rippling effects for other cases and how entire branches of government are expected to make decisions.

It was the first major Supreme Court precedent establishing presidential immunity since 1982 in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, wherein the court held that presidents enjoy immunity from civil liability for actions taken within the outer perimeter of his duties.

By taking up the case earlier this year, the Supreme Court created a lengthy delay for the pre-trial process and the case was eventually dismissed because of Trump’s election win. The court’s decision set a major historical precedent by outlining the contours of criminal immunity. For unofficial acts, presidents are not immune, while for official acts, presidents enjoy certain levels of immunity, according to the decision.

While courts should base their distinctions on what a president’s discretionary authority entails, some conduct could qualify “even when not obviously connected to a particular constitutional or statutory provision.”

Trump has attempted to apply that decision to his other criminal cases, including one still playing out in New York. For example, Trump argued in New York that prosecutors improperly used evidence, including testimony, that was prohibited under the immunity decision.

Some argued that Trump, as a former president, wasn’t the type of “officer of the United States” who was subject to disqualification under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Others disagreed with the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision that Trump had engaged in insurrection—on Jan. 6, 2021—as covered by that section.

Like the immunity decision, the decision in Trump v. Anderson also revealed divisions in the court. The court’s decision was 9–0 but justices produced separate concurrences that raised speculation that Justice Sonia Sotomayor might have initially intended to dissent.

The DOJ had charged some defendants with violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which contains provisions related to document destruction and obstructing an official proceeding.

The section in question reads: “Whoever corruptly—alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”

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The DOJ had argued that the second portion, starting with “or otherwise obstructs” allowed prosecutions that targeted obstructive conduct in a catch-all way that included methods other than those mentioned at the beginning of the section.

“To prove a violation of §1512(c)(2), the Government must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding, or attempted to do so.”

It’s unclear how Trump and his DOJ will apply the Fischer decision to the defendants’ unique circumstances. Sarbanes-Oxley carries a 20-year maximum sentence.

The DOJ said that after Fischer, the government “decided to forgo the Section 1512(c)(2) charge for approximately 96 defendants, will continue to pursue the charge for approximately 13 defendants, and continues to assess the remaining defendants.”

Known as “Chevron Deference,” the doctrine required judges to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of Congress’s laws when judging whether regulations were legal. That case and a pair of others in the 2023–2024 term seemed to position the court for a year of paring back administrative power while empowering the judiciary.

In February, the court heard oral arguments over those laws in the cases Netchoice v. Paxton and Moody v. Netchoice.

Kagan said that social media companies’ ability to present curated content was protected speech and that Texas “cannot prohibit speech to improve or better balance the speech market.”

That decision has been controversial for how it furthered a legal doctrine known as originalism, which generally uses statements and actions during the founding era to guide present-day constitutional interpretation.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit used Bruen to hold that the federal law in question was unconstitutional. That decision ended up at the Supreme Court in November, when the justices heard oral argument in U.S. v. Rahimi.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion in Bruen, was the sole dissent in the court’s eventual opinion. He disagreed with the Rahimi majority’s conclusion that the Constitution allowed the law. “Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue,” he said.

The majority suggested that Thomas interpreted Bruen too narrowly and required a historical “twin” to justify the law in question. Barrett similarly said that “imposing a test that demands overly specific analogues has serious problems.”