Memos show how Supreme Court justices scramble at the end of the session

Supreme Court justices are entering the peak season for back-channeling.

This is when individual justices intensify their private huddling to try to resolve seemingly intractable differences and when a personal plea – out of sight of the others – might persuade someone to abandon a concurring opinion that undercuts the main decision for the court.

This is also when justices move faster but also become more apprehensive about how the final decisions may land with the public. Will they be seen as “partisan,” or like a group of “namby pambies” (as retired Justice Anthony Kennedy once put it in a personal note in an abortion case)?

The justices have about six weeks left in the annual session and still about 40 cases to resolve, including the future of race-based admissions practices at colleges, the protective scope of federal voting-rights law, an Andy Warhol copyright challenge and the validity of the Biden administration student loan forgiveness program.

The newly opened papers of the late Justice John Paul Stevens at the Library of Congress reveal several instances of private one-on-one conversations as cases from the early 1990s through 2004 were in the final weeks of negotiation. Combined with interviews and other research over the years, these papers, the most recent available in any justice’s archive, flesh out the portrait of the high court on deadline.

One especially salient example involves an affirmative action dispute from 20 years ago, Grutter v. Bollinger. That decision could be erased as the justices decide pending challenges to admissions practices at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

Newly disclosed memos of internal debate from 2003 reveal that Stevens privately offered Sandra Day O’Connor some perspective for her 25-year limit on affirmative action – a point of contention in the current…