The Supreme Court term that ended Friday included an extraordinary run of victories for President Donald Trump, culminating in a 6-3 ruling largely eliminating the main tool that his opponents have used to thwart his aggressive agenda.

In that case and others, the justices used truncated procedures on their emergency docket to issue decisions that gave Trump some or all of what he had asked for in cases dealing with immigration, transgender troops and the independence of government agencies.

The emergency rulings in Trump’s favor were theoretically temporary and provisional. In practice, they allowed the president to pursue his policies indefinitely and sometimes irreversibly.

In the first 20 weeks of Trump’s second term, his administration filed 19 emergency applications asking the justices to pause lower court losses while lawsuits continued. That is the total number of such applications the Biden administration filed over four years, and far more than the eight applications filed over the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies.

The spike was a result of challenges to the blitz of executive orders issued by the administration since Trump took office. The upshot was a winning streak delivered by a court he remade in his first term, appointing three of the six conservative justices.

Many of the emergency decisions were based on rushed and cursory briefs, and came after the court did without oral arguments. They were usually delivered in orders containing scant or no reasoning.

Friday’s decision, which limited the availability of nationwide injunctions — rulings that bind not only the parties to the case but also everyone else affected by the challenged executive order — was an exception. It followed a special oral argument held by the court in May and yielded more than 100 pages of opinions. But it was the also the most important case on the emergency docket this term, as it did more than pause rulings from lower courts finding Trump administration measures unlawful. It made it much harder for lower courts to thwart such measures at all.

Rulings on emergency applications are seldom signed. While public dissents are common, it is possible that not all dissenting votes are disclosed, adding to the procedure’s lack of transparency.

But on the available evidence, six of the nine emergency orders involving the Trump administration since May were decided by 6-3 votes, with the court’s Republican appointees in the majority and the three Democratic ones in dissent.

Over the years, emergency applications were most commonly filed by death row inmates seeking stays of execution. These days, such stay applications almost never succeed.

Even excluding applications in capital cases, Trump’s success rate on the emergency docket has been notable. He has won almost three times as often as other applicants seeking emergency relief, said Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.

The court’s merits docket — made up of cases that arose in the normal way and mostly had little to do with Trump’s second-term agenda — told a different story, one less marked by stark ideological divisions.

In cases decided with signed majority opinions after full briefing, oral arguments and sober consideration, the court delivered 6-3 decisions in 10 cases out of 56, and just six of those split with the three liberal justices in dissent. In the term that ended last July, by contrast, there were 20 decisions decided by 6-3 votes.

But in a number of key cases, the court managed to produce unanimous decisions, even if the justices differed on the rationale.

All of the justices agreed, for instance, that a Catholic charity in Wisconsin was entitled to a tax exemption that had been denied by a state court because its activities were not primarily religious. They were united, too, in ruling that the Mexican government could not sue U.S. gun manufacturers in an attempt to hold them responsible for drug cartel violence.

The justices all agreed, too, that members of majority groups cannot be required to meet a heightened burden to prove workplace discrimination under a federal civil rights law.

In what could have been a blockbuster ruling endorsing religious charter schools, the court split 4-4 and let stand a lower court’s ruling going the other way. Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case. Had the court ruled that the First Amendment permits — or even requires — states to sponsor such schools, which are public schools with substantial autonomy, the wall separating church and state would have sustained a significant blow.

The court issued only 56 decisions in argued cases resolved with signed opinions, around the number it has issued since the term that ended in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. Those numbers are the smallest since at least the 1930s, according to data compiled and analyzed by Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University, and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.

But that trend has been accompanied by a rise in the number of cases decided on the emergency docket, which has profoundly changed the work and nature of the court, which does not produce its best work under intense time pressure. The unending stream of applications has also disrupted the rhythms of the lives of the justices, who are now never out of session.