President-elect Donald Trump‘s fraught, tempestuous, yet ultimately empowering relationship with the legal system has defined his political career. It dominated his first term, continued to play a critical role during his antipresidency, and is now poised to exert a decisive influence on his second administration. It will do so in the same forms it has already taken: his judicial appointments, his use of executive power to implement his agenda, and legal challenges by his administration and its opponents to enforce or defeat that agenda. Trump found his way to the White House in the first place due in no small part to the courts and the law. Now, in many ways, it is thanks to them that he finds himself on his way back to it. 

Neither the stakes nor the opportunity are quite so high as they were in 2016, when the winner of the election would fill the open seat held by the late Antonin Scalia (and perhaps a vacancy or two more), determining which party controlled the high court for the next few decades. But Trump will still be able to cement his legacy further on the federal bench, one that already includes three Supreme Court justices, over 50 appellate jurists, and more than 230 federal judges.