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The Supreme Court returns to the bench on Monday to start a term that will be studded with major cases on gay and transgender rights, immigration, abortion, guns and religion. The rulings will arrive by June, in the midst of an already divisive presidential campaign. That will thrust a court that has tried to keep a low profile back into the center of public attention. “It’s a very exciting term,” Lisa S. Blatt, a lawyer with Williams & Connolly, said. “Although the court will carry on with a sense of normalcy, it will be hard for them to ignore the polarization in the country on the issues of abortion, L.G.B.T. rights, guns and ‘Dreamers.’” (Liptak, 10/6)

Abortion rights as well as protections for young immigrants and LGBT people top an election-year agenda for the Supreme Court. Its conservative majority will have ample opportunity to flex its muscle, testing Chief Justice John Roberts' attempts to keep the court clear of Washington partisan politics. Guns could be part of a term with plenty of high-profile cases and at least the prospect of the court's involvement in issues revolving around the possible impeachment of President Donald Trump and related disputes between the White House and congressional Democrats. (10/5)

Two unknowns — the health of the court’s oldest member, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and whether the court will be drawn into legal controversies arising from the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into President Trump — add to the uncertainty. Resolution of the most contentious cases could happen in June, in the heat of a presidential campaign in which the future of the court has emerged as a galvanizing issue for conservatives and liberals. (Barnes, 10/6)

The Supreme Court, by tradition, has tried to stay out of big controversies in an election year. But the justices, even if reticent, don't always have control over their docket. When the lower courts are divided on major questions, the justices cannot always escape their responsibility to be the final decider. (Totenberg, 10/7)

At the center sits Chief Justice Roberts, a thoroughly conservative jurist who heads perhaps the most conservative Supreme Court in 80 years. He is dealing with competing pressures: seizing the opportunity to implement the rightward legal vision that animated his career versus exercising the restraint many believe necessary to preserve the court’s credibility. The chief justice also is facing the prospect of presiding over any Senate impeachment trial of Mr. Trump. It is a “misperception” to view the court as a political body, Chief Justice Roberts said last month in New York. Of 19 cases resolved by 5-4 votes last term, only seven fell along perceived ideological lines, he noted. “It shouldn’t come as a surprise because we don’t go about our work in a political manner,” he said. (Kendall and Bravin, 10/6)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to take up a major abortion case that could lead to new curbs on access to the procedure as it considers the legality of a Republican-backed Louisiana law that imposes restrictions on abortion doctors. The justices will hear an appeal by abortion provider Hope Medical Group for Women, which sued to try to block the law, of a lower court ruling upholding the measure. (Hurley, 10/5)

The Louisiana law, enacted in 2014, says physicians performing abortions must hold admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. Abortion-rights proponents who challenged the law say the restrictions provide no actual health and safety benefits for women seeking abortions and would leave the state with only one operating abortion clinic. The state disputes that claim, saying the law wouldn’t force the closure of any of the three clinics that operate within Louisiana, though it could cause short delays at one of them. (Kendall, 10/4)

The law is almost identical to a Texas law struck down by the Supreme Court in 2016. The vote in the 2016 decision was 5-3, with Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the court's four liberal-leaning justices to form a majority. It was decided by an eight-member court after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia that February. Since then, Justice Neil Gorsuch has replaced Scalia and Justice Brett Kavanaugh has replaced Kennedy. The federal appeals court in New Orleans upheld the Louisiana law last year notwithstanding the 2016 decision. (10/5)

It’s not clear where Kavanaugh and Gorsuch — both former circuit court judges — will land on the abortion issue; neither has ruled on such a case before. But the other conservative justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas — dissented in the Texas case. (Hellmann, 10/5)

Leaders on both sides of the issue took news of the court’s action as momentous, even if the questions in the case are narrow. “The Supreme Court now has a chance in this case to reconsider, reverse, and return Roe v. Wade and the issue of abortion to the American people, which is long overdue,” Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins said in a statement. “States should absolutely have the right to pass their own health and safety standards designed to protect women inside abortion vendors.” (Barnes, 10/4)

Abortion rights advocates say laws that require abortion performers to have hospital transfer agreements and that require doctors to who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals are meant to to shut down clinics by requiring that they have unneeded credentials that they won’t be able to secure. They say hospitals frequently deny admitting privileges to doctors who provide abortions, for reasons ranging from ideological opposition, fear of backlash, or the fact that their patients rarely need emergency care. (Eaton, 10/4)

The court is also scheduled to hear its first case on gun rights in nearly a decade, a development that advocates of gun rights are hoping will lead to an expansion of Second Amendment freedoms. The legal dispute involves an ordinance unique to New York City that allowed residents with a handgun permit to transport the gun, but only to shooting ranges within city limits. Gun owners who wanted to practice at ranges outside the city sued and lost, so they appealed to the Supreme Court. But after the high court agreed to hear the case, New York promptly rescinded the law, taking it off the books. (Wililams, 10/7)

The justices will waste no time diving into a divisive issue: Gay rights. Three cases will test whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans job discrimination on the basis of sex, applies to gay and transgender workers. The answer will be particularly important in 28 states that do not have their own protections. The cases pick up from where the same-sex marriage battle left off in 2015, when the court ruled 5-4 that states cannot ban gays and lesbians from getting married. But the author of that decision and others favoring gay rights, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, retired last year and was succeeded by Kavanaugh, whose vote will be key. (Wolf, 10/7)

The U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to consider how far states can go toward eliminating the insanity defense in criminal trials as it reviews the case of a Kansas man sentenced to die for killing four relatives. The high court planned to hear arguments Monday in James Kraig Kahler's case. He went to the home of his estranged wife's grandmother about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Topeka the weekend after Thanksgiving 2009 and fatally shot the two women and his two teenage daughters. (Hanna, 10/6)

Federal appeals court judges are set to hear arguments Monday over a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. It is one of many laws pushed by conservative states in recent years, ultimately aimed at trying to persuade the increasingly conservative Supreme Court to further restrict the time abortion is legally available. (10/5)