The United States Supreme Court will take the bench today to begin a term that touches on a broad variety of hot-button issues such as campaign finance, affirmative action, religion, presidential power and abortion restrictions.
One theme to watch: the unusually high number of cases in which the court is being asked to reconsider prior precedent. "How the court treats pre-existing precedent; that is really going to be the theme of the term in many ways," says Kannon Shanmugam, a lawyer at Williams and Connolly who frequently argues before the court. "This is the year of the sequel."