The Supreme Court term that ended Tuesday left almost everybody at least a little unhappy. President Trump suffered some stinging losses. Liberals rued decisions boosting presidential power and gutting the Voting Rights Act. Conservatives felt betrayed when Trump’s appointees occasionally voted with the court’s three liberals.

But one man had reason to be satisfied. The term was a triumph for Chief Justice John Roberts, who was in all but complete control of a court that had not long ago threatened to slip from his grasp.

“Despite the obvious tensions within the court and the difficulty of managing such a fiercely independent group of jurists, Roberts is on his way to becoming one of the most influential chief justices of all time,” said Vikram Amar, a law professor at the University of California, Davis.

Chief Justice Roberts has joked about how little authority comes with his title, attributing it to “the odd historical quirk that the chief justice only gets one vote.”

But he does have one key power: the chief justice gets to assign who will write the majority opinion when he is in the majority. And he was in the majority last term in 96 percent of argued cases, the highest rate of any member of the court.

That allowed him to keep and mold the three biggest opinions of the term.

One rejected the centerpiece of Trump’s beloved tariffs program and could lead to refunds of $166 billion in illegal levies. The second shifted the separation of powers, ruling that the president can fire leaders of independent agencies whom Congress had tried to insulate from politics. The third, in soaring rhetoric, reaffirmed the longstanding constitutional understanding that children born in the United States, with vanishingly few exceptions, automatically become citizens.

The chief justice wrote all three of those majority opinions.

“The tariffs, removal power and birthright citizenship decisions alone would be significant for any chief justice’s legacy,” said Gregory Garre, a lawyer with Latham & Watkins who served as solicitor general under President George W. Bush. “To produce all three in one term is astounding.”

The chief justice assigned other opinions strategically, leaning on Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to deliver hard-right rulings like the one reinterpreting the Voting Rights Act to allow states to redraw voting maps that had protected minority voting power. The chief justice joined that opinion without explaining how it could be reconciled with what he had written for the majority in a seemingly contrary decision in 2023.

Chief Justice Roberts seemed to have learned something from his experience in 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, where he issued a concurring opinion signed by no other justice that would have stopped short of overruling Roe v. Wade outright.

In that case, he was outflanked by five justices to his right. In what may have been the most important decision in his two-decade tenure, one that eliminated a constitutional right that had been in place for half a century, he was all by himself.

He seems to have drawn a lesson from that humiliating moment, one in which the newly emboldened conservative wing of his court rejected his leadership and his strategy of moving the law to the right in measured increments.

These days, it seems, if he can’t beat them he is prepared to join them.

Chief Justice Roberts was not cowed by Trump, who visited the Supreme Court in April to glare at the justices as they considered his executive order seeking to limit birthright citizenship.

In that case and the one on tariffs, Chief Justice Roberts stood up to the president. He also did so in rulings thwarting Trump’s attempt to fire a Fed governor, rejecting Trump’s interpretation of a law that he said barred counting some ballots received after Election Day and refusing to allow the deployment of the National Guard in Illinois.

“These are the cases President Trump cared about the most, and the administration lost across the board,” said Roman Martinez, a lawyer with Latham & Watkins and a former law clerk to Chief Justice Roberts. “In each case, the chief justice built cross-ideological coalitions consisting of himself, one or more Trump appointees to the court, and the three more liberal justices.”

Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, cautioned that the chief justice’s success in advancing his agenda did little to enhance the legitimacy of the court he leads, another one of his signature goals.

“In the short run, the chief had an excellent term,” she said, noting that he had achieved longstanding goals on voting rights and executive power. “But in the longer run,” she added, “I’m not sure he can manage to reverse the court’s sinking capital with the public, especially with so many high-profile 6-3 decisions that benefit the Trump administration in one way or another.”

For the time being and for better or worse, Chief Justice Roberts is in charge.

“The chief had his most challenging term since he joined the court more than 20 years ago,” said Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard and an old friend of the chief justice.

“Outside the court, he faced a president who found obvious pleasure in lacerating any justice, including the chief, who defied the president’s wishes,” Lazarus said. “Within the court, he faced a majority of five justices — Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch on the right and Sotomayor and Jackson on the left — who regularly made clear how little respect they had for others on the court who did not share their views.”

“The chief,” Lazarus said, “has earned the summer recess.”

More on the Momentous Supreme Court Term

Mailbag

A Bigger House of Representatives?

“I wonder why there hasn’t been a challenge to the Taft-era cap on House representation. It seems to me that expanded representation could greatly diminish the impact of gerrymandering. Is this something that Congress could do, or would SCOTUS have a say in the law?” — Marie Allyn King

The first House, which sat from 1789 to 1791, had 65 members. It then grew in every decade but one until it reached 435 members in 1911, when William Howard Taft was president. The cap was enacted in 1929, by which time Taft was chief justice.

But the cap need not be permanent, and there is no magic to the number 435. Congress could change it anytime through ordinary legislation.

Today’s districts are by historical standards unwieldy. In 1911, each member of Congress represented, on average, about 200,000 people. These days that number is around 770,000.

It is not clear whether increasing the size of the House would significantly thwart partisan gerrymandering, but most experts say it would help by making more districts competitive.

The Supreme Court is quite unlikely to address the matter. When a challenge to the cap reached the justices in 2010, they dismissed the case “for lack of jurisdiction,” apparently concluding that the matter was for Congress to decide.

I’d love to hear your questions on the law, the courts or whatever is on your mind. Send them my way at the-docket@nytimes.com.

Back in February, I wrote about a petition Alan Dershowitz filed in the Supreme Court. Dershowitz, the combative Harvard law professor who has represented O.J. Simpson and Jeffrey Epstein, asked the justices to hear his appeal in a libel case against CNN and to overturn a seminal 1964 case on press freedom, New York Times v. Sullivan.

Sullivan and the decisions that followed in its wake made it very hard for government officials and public figures to win libel suits by requiring them to prove not only that the defendant had published a falsehood harmful to the plaintiff’s reputation but also had done that with “actual malice” — that is, knowing the information to be false or entertaining serious doubts about its truth.

Dershowitz, who claimed CNN had defamed him by mischaracterizing his defense of Trump during Trump’s 2020 impeachment trial, lost his libel suit against the network but said he would have won but for Sullivan.

The trial judge and a member of the three-judge appeals court panel agreed. As Judge Barbara Lagoa, a Trump appointee, put it in a concurring opinion, “the only thing standing between Dershowitz and justice is Sullivan.”

So he asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, rule in his favor and overturn the press-friendly precedent. Dershowitz had some reason to be optimistic about his petition. Two members of the Supreme Court — Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — had previously urged the court to reconsider Sullivan. It takes four votes to grant review.

On Monday, the justices turned down Dershowitz’s appeal, over the dissents of those same two justices.

Justice Thomas, quoting from an earlier opinion, wrote that “the ‘actual malice’ standard for public figures bears no relation to the text, history or structure of the Constitution.”

“Instead,” he added, “the founding generation believed that, if anything, public figures had stronger claims for damages when they were defamed.”

The bottom line: two justices are on a mission to hear a case that would allow them to take on a First Amendment landmark. But they have yet to attract the third and fourth votes needed to do it.

Please send me your comments on the chief justice, the size of the House, the future of the Sullivan decision or anything else at the-docket@nytimes.com. See you soon. — Adam