First Things has posted online law professor Michael Paulsen’s excellent essay offering his overview of the Supreme Court’s 2013-2014 Term. Here’s an excerpt:

The biggest cases decided by the Supreme Court in the term that ended this past July concerned, almost without exception, First Amendment liberties of expression, association, and free exercise of religion. And that is appropriate. Those of us whose views are not in accord with the current trend of national politics and policies have little left if deprived of the rights to dispute, to dissent, to resist, to refrain, to refuse, to contest. These freedoms are the last line of defense.…
Measured by the low standards of the desperate, the Supreme Court’s 2013–14 term was on the whole a spectacularly good one. The term was, if anything, a relief. In the cases that really mattered, the Court reached the right results and gave support to the rights of dissenters, albeit with more equivocation and labor than one might have preferred. The opinions typically were not sweeping, beautiful landmarks. But at least they were not the cataclysms that we have so often come to dread, and see.