Adam Liptak in the NYT:

The current court is the first in history split along partisan lines, where the party of the president who appointed each justice is a reliable predictor of judicial ideology. Put another way, all five Republican appointees are to the right of all four Democratic appointees. It was not long ago that Republican appointees like Justices John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter routinely voted with the court’s liberal wing.

As a consequence of the current alignment, Professor Devins said, “the Roberts court has generated more marquee decisions divided by party alignment than all other courts combined.”

The last term’s big cases did not for the most part follow that pattern because Justice Kennedy, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and sits at the court’s ideological fulcrum, voted with the court’s liberal wing at an unusually high rate.

“The story of the last term is that the left side of the court did a lot of winning,” said Irving L. Gornstein, the executive director of Georgetown’sSupreme Court Institute.

“This term,” he added, “I would expect a return to the norm, with the right side of the court winning a majority but by no means all of the big cases, with Justice Kennedy again the key vote.”