Eight days ago, the Roberts court handed the Trump administration its first major loss on the interim docket in several months. Throughout this term, the court will also be deciding several important issues relating to presidential power. Whether with these events in mind or not, Chief Justice John Roberts used his latest year-end report – which he releases every year on New Year’s Eve – to reassure the public that federal judges will decide cases impartially, and that the guarantees provided by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution “remain firm and unshaken.”

In his 2024 report, Roberts discussed what he saw as threats to judicial independence. His reports for 2023 and 2022 discussed the legal profession and the role of artificial intelligence and the importance of judicial security, respectively.

Roberts released his 2025 report at the end of a year in which the court’s conservative majority faced criticism for a series of rulings in favor of President Donald Trump on the court’s interim docket. Among other things, the justices allowed the president to fire the members of several independent agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, despite statutory restrictions on his ability to do so; sided with the Trump administration on various orders regarding immigration; and permitted the State Department to implement a policy that limits sex designations on passports for transgender and nonbinary people. And in one of the final arguments of 2025, the court’s conservatives appeared poised to strike down a federal law that restricts the president’s ability to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission.

In his 2025 report, Roberts found inspiration in Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” a 47-page pamphlet that celebrates its 250th anniversary on Jan. 10. As Roberts recounts, the booklet “electrified the country and played a crucial role in stimulating a vote for independence in the Second Continental Congress six months later,” which led in turn to the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, which was adopted in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Although the Declaration of Independence is not actually part of U.S. law, Roberts noted, “it has played a signal role in the development of the Nation’s constitutional, statutory, and common law.” The report marched through U.S. history and efforts to vindicate the promise of the Declaration of Independence, from the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, to the suffragettes and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. “The Nineteenth Amendment [which gave women the right to vote], the overruling of Plessy [v. Ferguson] in Brown v. Board of Education, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, among other landmark developments, carried forward the Nation’s ongoing project to make the ideals set out in the Declaration real for all Americans, in the never-ending quest to fulfill the Constitution’s promise of a ‘more perfect Union,’” Roberts wrote.  

“These national accomplishments,” Roberts said, “illustrate that the responsibilities for living up to the promises of the Declaration rest on all three branches of our government as well as on each successive generation of Americans.” And in particular, Roberts stressed, federal judges “must continue to decide the cases before us according to our oath, doing equal right to the poor and to the rich, and performing all of our duties faithfully and impartially under the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

Roberts closed his report with a quote from President Calvin Coolidge for the country’s 150th anniversary in 1926. “Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics,” Coolidge said, “every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.” Coolidge’s statement, Roberts emphasized, was “[t]rue then” and remains “true now.”

The justices return to the bench for more oral arguments on Jan. 12. Even in a term filled with blockbusters, the court’s January argument session is packed with high-profile cases, including a pair of challenges to the constitutionality of state laws banning transgender women and girls from participating on women’s and girls’ sports teams, a challenge to a Hawaii law restricting where licensed gun owners can carry their guns, and Trump’s efforts to fire a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors based on allegations of mortgage fraud that she disputes.

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