Nina Totenberg

The court's most conservative members upheld the Texas law, but almost as important as the result was how the court reached its decision — without full briefing and arguments before any court.

The Supreme Court's most conservative members upheld a Texas law banning abortions after about six weeks. But the court reached its decision without full briefing and arguments before any court.

The law bans abortions after cardiac activity is detected, usually about six weeks into pregnancy and well before many people even know they are pregnant. The ruling is at odds with court precedents.

The law also allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone else who helps a woman obtain an abortion, including those who give a woman a ride to a clinic.

The court has agreed to partially lift a ban on evictions for renters in New York state, which was already scheduled to expire at the end of the month.

Abortion-rights defenders promptly seized on the state's brief, noting that until now Mississippi had portrayed its appeal as far more limited.

According to statistics compiled through NPR number crunching and the SCOTUSblog Stat Pack, the justices swerved to the right, even by the standards of the traditionally conservative Roberts court.

The court's term ranged from compromise to confrontation, with the conservative supermajority holding back until almost the end of the term.

By a vote of 6-to-3 on Thursday the Supreme Court's conservative majority made it far more difficult to challenge voting restrictions throughout the country.

The U.S. Supreme Court largely gutted what remains of the landmark Voting Rights Act, once hailed as one of the most effective civil rights legislation in U.S. history.

By a 6-3 vote, the court ruled that California unconstitutionally applied its law requiring nonprofits to file a list of their large donors with the state.

The justices, in a 6-3 opinion, narrowed the only major section of the landmark Voting Rights Act that remains in effect.

By a 5-4 vote, the court left in place the nationwide moratorium on evictions put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The moratorium is set to expire on July 31.

The case involved the death of a prisoner held for 15 minutes in a face-down prone position. Separately, the court declined to take up a case brought by a marijuana dispensary.

The court left in place a lower court decision declaring that local school boards may not require transgender high school students to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex listed at birth.

In a 5-4 ruling, the justices sided with the TransUnion credit reporting company, ruling that thousands of consumers whose names were improperly flagged cannot sue the company for damages.

At issue was a California law allowing union organizers to enter farms to speak to workers during nonworking hours for a set number of days each year.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with students on Wednesday, ruling that a former cheerleader's online F-bombs about her school is protected speech under the First Amendment.

At issue in the case was a California law that allows union organizers to enter farms to speak to workers during nonworking hours for a set a number of days each year.

But the court agreed that the Federal Housing Finance Agency has a design flaw that violates the Constitution: The president must be able to remove the agency's director without cause.