Former President Donald Trump‘s judicial nominees have made an impact on abortion, guns and administrative law, but legal experts say they also have written opinions that have caught the attention of the Supreme Court, often guiding oral arguments and rulings. 

Conservative court watchers Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, and Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, said the Trump judges are of such a high caliber that the circuit court appointees have been able to sway the justices in some of their high-profile cases.

Mr. Levey pointed to major disputes out of the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals such as the abortion pill battle, the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and immigration cases that have come before the justices this term.

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“Trump will be remembered not just for conservative circuit court appointments but for the fact that a lot of them were really great intellectuals that wrote opinions that were noticed by the Supreme Court,” Mr. Levey said.

“The way they are setting things up for the Supreme Court is really important and significant and that is one of the things that sets his judges apart,” said Ms. Severino. “That is important for helping the court understand the full range of arguments, especially the full range of originalism arguments.”

During his tenure, Mr. Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices, 54 circuit court judges and 174 district court judges. By comparison, former President Barack Obama appointed two Supreme Court justices and 55 circuit court judges during two terms in office.

The number of Mr. Trump’s nominees led him to be able to flip three circuit courts during his administration from majority Democrat to majority Republican.

Jake Faleschini, legal director of state courts at the progressive Alliance for Justice, said it is not just the number of Trump judges who were placed on the bench, but their ideology that’s led to their rulings impacting every area of the law — and in his view, the decisions have had a negative affect.

“There are decisions the Supreme Court and Trump judges have made that influence your walk down the street every day,” Mr. Faleschini said, adding that they have ruled on “everything from abuse of government authority, age discrimination, criminal justice, the rights of corporations and the undermining of rights of consumers, the death penalty, education, and environment — freedom of speech, gun violence.”

“It is entirely and completely invasive,” he said.

Maybe the most notable decision of Mr. Trump’s appointments was the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that gave women a national right to abortion. In a 6-3 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, the high court returned jurisdiction over the issue to the states. 

Since then, more than a dozen states have moved to outlaw the procedure.

Elliot Mincberg, senior fellow for the progressive People For the American Way, said that even conservative justices in the past had kept Roe intact while weighing abortion-related matters, but Mr. Trump’s justices completely did away with the roughly 50-year-old precedent.

“It took the Trump justices to really turn it around,” Mr. Mincberg said.

The Trump judicial nominees also made a major impact on the Second Amendment in 2022 with the ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, where the court’s conservative majority held that any gun control law had to be consistent with the nation’s history and tradition dating back to the founding. If there were not a restraint on a firearm dating back to the founding, then the law would likely be unconstitutional.

Mr. Faleschini said that the Trump appointees practice originalism when it works for their end goal. He said the justices “didn’t bother to do an analysis of the actual hardware that was in circulation in the late 1700s, so originalism as to what? So that methodology can always be manipulated to fit an outcome that you want.” 

Aside from abortion and guns, Mr. Levey said the former president’s appointments have reshaped administrative law. He pointed to the high court striking down President Biden’s move to forgive student debt for more than 40 million Americans, and another case in which the Environmental Protection Agency’s reach over wetlands citing the Clean Water Act was limited by the conservative majority.

“I would say administrative law has probably been where his Supreme Court appointments have had the biggest effect,” he said.

Mr. Faleschini, meanwhile, said voting rights have been an area reshaped by Trump judges. He noted a recent move by two Trump appointees who were on a three-judge panel that struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, which had added a second majority Black district. That dispute is being appealed to the Supreme Court.

“There is no more damage that the Trump judges or the Supreme Court can do to our Constitution than to undermine the right of the people to choose their representatives in free and fair elections,” Mr. Faleschini said.