Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, speaking at Yale Law School, sharply questioned how her colleagues on the Supreme Court are using its emergency docket, saying the practice risks eroding public trust. In a speech posted online Wednesday, Jackson said the court's stay orders in high-stakes disputes are often released with scant explanation despite affecting millions of people, calling some results "utterly irrational" and "enormously disruptive." She argued that what critics call the shadow docket has departed from the court's historically cautious use of emergency relief and has caused confusion for lower courts and the public, Politico reports.
The hourlong speech Monday included an assessment of roughly two dozen court orders issued last year that benefited President Trump, allowing him to put in place policies on immigration, steep federal funding cuts, and other issues even after lower courts found they were probably illegal, per the AP. Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh have defended the court's emergency work as a response to rising numbers of urgent filings. Jackson said the opposite is true, per Politico, arguing that frequent grants are incentivizing more such appeals.
Jackson urged a reordering of how justices handle emergency appeals: first weighing the real-world consequences of intervening, then turning to the underlying legal claims. She suggested that such a framework might have changed outcomes in several Trump administration cases in which the court allowed mass firings of federal employees, the cancellation of large federal grants and contracts, and the termination of legal protections for millions of immigrants. She also rejected the administration's contention that blocking a president's policy goals automatically constitutes the kind of irreparable harm that warrants Supreme Court action, saying the president "certainly isn't harmed if what he wants to do is illegal." Yale Law school posted a video of the remarks here.
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