Washington (AFP) — United States President Donald Trump’s unprecedented expansion of the powers of the US presidency will be put to the test when the Supreme Court returns for its fall term on Monday.

“The crucial question will be whether it serves as a check on President Trump or just a rubber stamp approving his actions,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School.

If past is prologue, the Republican leader is in line to notch up more legal victories from a conservative-dominated bench that includes three of his own appointees.

On the docket are voting rights, state bans on the participation of transgender athletes in girls’ sports and a religious freedom case involving a Rastafarian who had his knee-length dreadlocks forcibly shorn while in prison.

But the blockbuster case this term concerns Trump’s levying of hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs on imports and whether he had the statutory authority to do so.

Lower courts have ruled he did not.

But the Supreme Court has overwhelmingly sided with Trump since he returned to office, allowing, for example, mass firing of federal workers, the dismissal of members of independent agencies, the withholding of funds appropriated by Congress and racial profiling in his sweeping immigration crackdown.

“You’ve seen the court go out of its way, really bend over backwards, in order to green-light Trump administration positions,” said Cecillia Wang, national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Many of those decisions have come on the controversial emergency or “shadow” docket, where the court hands down orders after little briefing, without oral arguments and with paltry explanation.

Samuel Bray, a University of Chicago law professor, described it as the “legal equivalent of fast food” and the court’s three liberal justices have condemned the increasing use of the emergency docket.