In terms of the ideological balance of the Supreme Court, the death of Justice Antonin Scalia is monumental. With Scalia, the court had four reliable conservative votes and, in Justice Kennedy, the court had a conservative swing vote.
That led to many decisions that were decided by a razor thin 5-to-4 margin. To gauge Scalia's importance, we dug through the Supreme Court Database and found that during Obama's presidency, 53 cases have been decided by a 5-4 majority that included Scalia.
Here are six cases that could have turned out vastly different without Scalia:
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
