In light of the controversy last year about the name of this blog and this part of the docket, I wanted to observe that in yesterday's opinion in Trump v. Cook the Supreme Court referred to this part of the docket as "our interim docket."
I think it is the first time the Justices have used this label in an opinion — and in a majority opinion of the Court, no less!
There is much to say about yesterday’s immigration cases, but consider a specific jurisdictional problem that arose in Mullin v. Doe.
There is a question about whether the federal courts have been stripped of jurisdiction over constitutional challenges to the termination of Temporary Protected Status. There is also a question about whether the Trump administration’s termination of Haiti’s status is unconstitutional in light of the racist things that the President and Secretary of Homeland Security have said about Haiti and Haitians.
Justice Alito’s opinion decides to resolve the case on the second ground, leaving the first undecided. This would ordinarily be an unremarkable instance of judicial discretion to order the questions presented. But there is a special rule, famously expounded by Justice Scalia’s opinion for the Court in Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Environment, that courts have no such discretion when the first question is about jurisdiction. “[S]uch an approach,” Justice Scalia wrote, “carries the courts beyond the bounds of authorized judicial action and thus offends fundamental principles of separation of powers.”
There had been practical reasons that courts of appeals had countenanced the exercise of “hypothetical jurisdiction.” If the claimant is going to lose anyway, why not pick the easier or simpler ground for them to lose? The Steel Co. Court responded:
Hypothetical jurisdiction produces nothing more than a hypothetical judgment—which comes to the same thing as an advisory opinion, disapproved by this Court from the beginning. Much more than legal niceties are at stake here. . . . For a court to pronounce upon the meaning or the constitutionality of a state or federal law when it has no jurisdiction to do so is, by very definition, for a court to act ultra vires.
In Mullin, however, Justice Alito distinguishes Steel Co. with the fascinating argument that it does not apply to the interim docket:
It is a cardinal rule that a federal court may not consider the merits of a claim without first making a firm determination that it has jurisdiction. Steel Co. v. Citizens for Better Environment, 523 U. S. 83, 93–94 (1998).
When interim relief is sought, however, a court does not make a final decision on any matter necessary to the ultimate judgment. Instead, the court makes only a predictive—not a final—decision about the outcome of the case. And the likelihood that the court has jurisdiction over a claim and the likelihood that the claim is meritorious both bear on the claim’s ultimate prospects. See Arizona v. Biden, 31 F. 4th 469, 479 (CA6 2022) (Sutton, C. J.). So in evaluating the likelihood-of-success question for the purpose of ruling on a request for interim relief, courts may consider both the likelihood that they have jurisdiction and the likelihood that the claim will succeed on the merits. If they conclude that a claim fails on either ground, they must deny interim relief. Similarly, a court with appellate jurisdiction may reverse on either jurisdictional or merits grounds a lower court order that granted interim relief. But courts need not always start with the jurisdictional ground if the claim for interim relief would also fail on the merits.
Here, we review the District Court’s award of interim relief. Thus, in evaluating Miot respondents’ likelihood of success on their equal protection claim, we may reverse the District Court’s grant of interim relief on either jurisdictional or merits grounds.
Now I get the intuition. But does it really work? Much of what Justice Alito writes here could have been written on the other side of Steel Co. The point that might distinguish the two is that decisions about interim relief “make[] only a predictive—not a final—decision about the outcome of the case.” So is the idea that “hypothetical jurisdiction” is enough to issue “predictive decisions” but not “final decisions”? But why not demand at least “predictive jurisdiction” to issue predictive decisions? Wouldn’t hypothetical jurisdiction produce only a hypothetical prediction?
A simpler way to put the objection is that interim relief is still relief. It is true that it is a different kind of relief than a final judgment, and it is true that the denial of interim relief does not have the same preclusive effect as a final judgment on the merits. But in this case, the lower courts had granted interim relief, and the Supreme Court treated those grants as judgments and reversed them, on non-jurisdictional grounds. That is a form of appellate relief for the government, which the Court issued by pronouncing on the merits of the claim.
Now maybe this distinction would make more sense if we concluded that Supreme Court decisions about interim status had no precedential status. But in recent cases the Court has explicitly upped the precedential status of interim docket decisions, and it appears that the Justices expect lower courts and litigants to treat interim docket decisions from the Supreme Court as functionally conclusive about the legal issues they decide. That runs squarely into Steel Co.’s formalist concern that a Court with no jurisdiction to make precedent might do so anyway.
[We might also wonder what Justice Alito thinks about the inverse situation. Suppose a lower court thinks that is probably, but not definitely, has jurisdiction; and it thinks that the plaintiff is probably, but not definitely, is right on the merits. (If you care, make both probabilities 71% so that even multiplied as independent probabilities the product is greater than 50%.) Is that sufficient ground to issue interim relief, or should the court actually have to assure itself that it does have jurisdiction? I am not sure what Justice Alito would say.]
Now interestingly, and I guess hearteningly, this portion of Mullin is the one portion that does not command a majority. Justices Gorsuch and Barrett declined to join it, so there is no binding precedent for the proposition that the interim docket can be used to issue hypothetical precedents notwithstanding Steel Co.
But this does raise a further puzzle — Justices Gorsuch and Barrett nonetheless went on to join the Court’s resolution of the merits! Does this mean that they implicitly accept the plurality’s conclusion about Steel Co. but don’t want to tell us why? Or does this mean that they actually think that the Court does have jurisdiction, either because the jurisdiction-stripping provision is unconstitutional or because they believe strongly in the quasi-constitutional clear statement rule? Both of these latter conclusions would be surprising — though not unthinkable — in light of Justice Gorsuch’s and Barrett’s other jurisprudential commitments.
Or perhaps Justices Barrett and Gorsuch peeled off without explanation primarily as a way to avoid establishing any precedent on this issue. Hopefully, they have their reasons, and it may be that failing to establish a precedent on this point is the wiser course for now. At the same time, it is yet another example of uncertainty about the rules for adjudication of important cases on the shadow docket — a problem that has not gone away even as the number of such cases increases.
[Cross-posted from Divided Argument.]
The New York Times has obtained copies of some of the internal correspondence that resulted in a 2016 order pausing the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan. Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak describe these as “Shadow Papers,” describe the order as “The birth of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket,” and so on. I have gotten a lot of excited questions about these, but in my view they don’t tell us anything particularly scandalous about the Court.
First, it’s true that the Clean Power Plan stay was something of a big deal at the time, and that with the benefit of hindsight it can be seen as something of an inflection point for the shadow docket. This is partly for boring technical reasons (the difference between staying an executive action directly versus staying a lower court decision), partly because the Clean Power Plan was a consequential policy, and partly because as things turned out, the Court did not end up ruling directly on the merits of the Obama Administration plan, so the stay ended up being the last word. But we basically knew all of this at the time. Here’s Lisa Heinzerling in 2016, The Supreme Court’s Clean-Power Power Grab.
Second, the Court’s reasoning — while perfectly debatable — is basically what the parties and others had argued at the time. The Court thought the administration’s legal interpretation was implausible, especially in light of the novelty and magnitude of the executive action at issue. It was also troubled by the fact that its earlier ruling in Michigan v. EPA had proved to be largely ineffective because the Court had waited too long to rule. Again, my memory is this is what careful observers believed was happening at the time.
It is somewhat interesting to have it confirmed and see exactly what the Justices said, and again there is plenty of room to argue that the major questions doctrine is wrong, that the Court should have been more passive, etc. (I don’t necessarily disagree.) But it doesn’t seem to me that we’ve acquired much new information, and nothing new that is especially troubling.
Third, some people seem to be scandalized somehow by Chief Justice Roberts’s role in this. But he is the circuit justice for the D.C. Circuit, so he would normally be the first person to circulate his views about the application and propose a resolution. And we have already known for over a decade that the Chief Justice supported granting the application. The fact that he wrote a memo saying so, for the somewhat obvious reasons, isn’t that much of a revelation.
Relatedly, while everybody likes to describe Chief Justice Roberts as a committed “institutionalist,” I think people regularly overread their own label, or at least misunderstand what it means. Institutionalism does not necessarily mean foregoing one’s own view of the law, and it certainly does not mean adopting the readers’ and the critics’ views instead of one’s own. And in any event, surely acting on the concern that the executive branch is openly circumventing the federal courts should count as institutionalist.
Fourth, it is worth remembering that this all happened ten years ago, and that the authors of the memos did not have the benefit of our hindsight. When the Clean Power Plan memos were written, Antonin Scalia was alive, Barack Obama was President, and the last two years of the Obama administration seemed as if they had marked an unprecedented rise in unilateral executive lawmaking which the Court was responding to. We now know that First Trump Administration, Biden Administration, and Second Trump Administration would each make the late Obama years look placid in comparison. We now know that the federal courts would get sucked (or willingly jump) into a cycle of litigation against the executive branch, for better or worse. But it is unclear whether all of this was foreseen or foreseeable in February 2016.
Fifth, the biggest scandal here is in fact the leaks themselves. Supreme Court leaks like these — including copies of confidential work product — are becoming more common. In my view, this is a bad thing. It will damage the institutional culture of the Court and do little good. But Jodi Kantor is a super-powered investigative reporter, determined to break through some of the Court’s norms of confidentiality, and I would bet on her succeeding. If so, we will have to become skilled at figuring out what these documents really tell us, and what they do not.
[Cross-posted from Divided Argument.]
Over the weekend Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak published several stories in the New York Times based on the internal Supreme Court memoranda that led to the famous interim order staying President Obama’s Clean Power Plan in 2016.
The CPP order was unusual, but not because the Court temporarily decided a very important issue via an interim order with no explanation. That had happened quite a lot, even outside the death penalty and election contexts. See for example these two interim orders from 2014 on abortion and same-sex marriage.
The CPP order was novel at the time, I believe, because it temporarily shut down a presidential program even before the court below had a chance to rule on the issue. (The Court did something similar last year in enjoining President Trump’s Alien Enemies Act deportations.) Viewed from the perspective of 2026, this order fairly marks the beginning of the Court’s modern active engagement with presidential initiatives via interim orders, as Kantor and Liptak suggest.
The CPP memoranda implicate lots of meaty legal and institutional issues which I will analyze in due course. But for now I simply want to flag what I view as unfortunately tendentious reporting about the memoranda, especially but not exclusively about the Chief Justice.
Without any support in the documents, Kantor and Liptak say the Chief Justice seemed “angry” and “irritated” in the memos and they portray him as an almost bad-faith actor.
I also do not think “the papers show” that the Chief Justice “acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis.” It was the Chief Justice’s responsibility to write the initial memo with his views and his prerogative to note disagreements with others. But he had no power to “bulldoze” anyone into voting any particular way—especially Justice Kennedy, “the court’s ideological fulcrum,” who cast the deciding fifth vote for a reason not offered by the Chief Justice.
Kantor and Liptak frame the order as part of a larger personal battle between the Chief Justice and President Obama, even though the Chief Justice wrote two opinions that saved Obamacare and also voted to uphold a different Obama EPA initiative. (Kantor and Liptak note that the Chief Justice voted to uphold one of the Obamacare cases but say “that was approved by Congress.” But of course the Chief Justice thought the CPP was not authorized by Congress.)
Kantor and Liptak say the Chief Justice “and the other conservative justices have repeatedly empowered the president through their shadow docket rulings” without mentioning the very consequential rulings against Trump on the shadow docket (such as this, this, and this), or the fact that every interim order Trump has won came to the Court preselected by the solicitor general based on likelihood of success.
They mention that the Chief Justice’s legal analysis for the order rested in part on the major questions doctrine that “in the years since . . . has played an increasingly important role in the court’s work.” Since their central message is that the conservative majority led by the Chief Justice is unprincipled and outcome-driven, they might have mentioned that two months ago he wrote an opinion for three conservative justices that invoked major questions to strike down President Trump’s signature tariff policy. (Three liberal justices joined the tariff invalidation but did not rely on the major questions doctrine.)
I also have a hard time understanding why Kantor and Liptak called out and went into biographical detail about the law clerks who worked on and initialed the memos for the Chief Justice and Justice Alito but failed to mention or say anything about the law clerk who apparently initialed the Breyer memo.
They also say that the Chief Justice took the “unusual step of quoting” a BBC interview in which the EPA administrator effectively said (in Kantor and Liptak’s words) that “the agency was baking the Clean Power Plan into the system in ways that later presidents and Congress would not be able to undo.” I’m not sure how unusual this is, especially since (as they failed to mention) this interview was cited in and relied on in the application for the interim order.
There are other small things in the stories that seemed unfair or misleading. I see no value in listing more, and I am sure others will see things differently. Kantor and Liptak have provided the documents that form the basis of their story and so you can study them and decide for yourself.
I thank Tia Sewell for editorial assistance.
[Cross-posted from Executive Functions.]
Earlier this week, in Malliotakis v. Williams, the Supreme Court stayed a New York trial court decision requiring a “crossover” district. The biggest controversy about that interim ruling has not been the merits but rather the Court’s jurisdiction. 28 U.S.C. 1257 limits the Court’s certiorari jurisdiction over the state courts to “Final judgments or decrees rendered by the highest court of a State in which a decision could be had.” And while this statute sometimes has been interpreted with questionable flexibility, it imposes an important and distinct constraint on Supreme Court jurisdiction over state courts.
The problem is the trial court decision in Malliotakis is not a “final judgment or decree rendered by the highest Court of a State in which a decision could be had.” The highest court would be the New York Court of Appeals, which has not taken part in the merits at all, and may not have even issued a final decision on whether to issue a stay. (In addition to Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, the most timely and thorough treatment of this is — as usual — on Steve Vladeck’s Substack, which is for paid subscribers, but worth paying for.)
What can be said to justify the stay? The Court did not write anything, but Justice Alito wrote a concurring opinion making two or three distinct arguments. One argument is that the decision really was final, because the New York Court of Appeals did not issue a stay when they were asked to do so. The problem, as Justice Sotomayor and Steve Vladeck discuss, is that that’s probably not the right characterization of the procedural posture. I find this confusing, because New York appellate procedure is very confusing to outsiders, and because the briefs focused a lot on the specific need to issue a stay by a certain date in February (which is reminiscent of the issue of federal jurisdiction in AARP v. Trump) but from what I’ve read so far, the critics seem to have the better side of this argument.
Another argument, which might or might not be distinct from the first, is that the Supreme Court did something very similar in National Socialist Party of America v. Skokie, rejecting by a 5-4 vote Justice Rehnquist’s objection that “I simply do not see how the refusal of the Supreme Court of Illinois to stay an injunction granted by an inferior court within the state system can be described as a “final judgment or decree rendered by the highest court of a State in which a decision could be had.”
But the Skokie majority rested on two important facts — that the Illinois Supreme Court had in fact denied the stay (AND “leave for an expedited appeal”) and that the First Amendment itself required “strict procedural safeguards, including immediate appellate review,” or “[a]bsent such review, the State must instead allow a stay.” Neither fact is present in Malliotakis, where it is not clear that the New York Court of Appeals really did deny the stay, and where the case does not concern the First Amendment, which has been held, rightly or wrongly, to require special procedural protections that have not extended to colorblindness doctrine.
But Justice Alito makes a different point, which I think might actually be right, although I have not seen it discussed extensively. Perhaps the finality requirement does not actually apply to stays. As Justice Alito puts it:
We are likewise authorized to grant a stay because it is “necessary or appropriate in aid of [our] jurisdiction.” 28 U. S. C. §1651(a). That requirement is met when a stay is “necessary to prevent a state court from so interfering with a federal court’s consideration or disposition of a case as to seriously impair the federal court’s flexibility and authority to decide that case.”
As I understand it, the argument is that Section 1257’s finality requirement restricts the writ of certiorari, but it does not of its own force restrict other writs, which are authorized under a different statute, Section 1651(a), aka The All Writs Act. To be sure, the All Writs Act has its own limitations. It does not expand the jurisdiction of the federal courts and authorizes only writs that are “in aid of” the jurisdiction granted by other statutes. But at least in some cases, surely that will be true of stays.
Imagine, for instance, state court litigation about the execution of a prisoner who is due to be executed at midnight: the state supreme court simply has not ruled on a pending stay request as the clock ticks toward the fatal hour. In such a case, the Court can surely act to stay the execution and preserve its own jurisdiction over the case. Because the Court will (potentially) eventually have jurisdiction under Section 1257 to review the final order when it is issued, it has the power under Section 1651 to preserve that jurisdiction as the litigation progresses. And indeed, in Justice Alito’s dissent in the Yeshiva University case he made a similar point, citing several precedents that seem to support this view of the Court’s stay authority.
Now, even if Justice Alito and I are right that the Supreme Court can issue stays in non-final state court litigation, this still leaves several open questions.
1: Was issuing a stay really “necessary or appropriate” in Malliotakis?
A: The fact that there was further state court review and (as I just discussed above) that the New York Court of Appeals maybe had not denied a stay might make it unnecessary for the Court to protect the status quo if the state courts were going to do it themselves. But asking this question through the “necessary and appropriate” lens of the All Writs Act rather than the finality lens of 1257 might well make a difference, especially if what is involved is an equitable judgment about the pointlessness of further proceedings.
B: And putting that aside, what was the threat to the Court’s future jurisdiction? Unlike a stay of execution, the threat to the Court’s future jurisdiction was less vivid, and in many cases a wrongly-eliminated district, unlike a wrongly-killed person, can be brought back by appellate decree. Justice Alito argues that the issue arises from the Court’s own equitable Purcell principle, which limits the power of federal courts to interfere in elections as they draw too near. I’m not sure what I think about that claim; again, it seems most analogous to me to the issues in AARP, where I thought a stay might well be appropriate, but ironically Justice Alito did not.
2: What other principles might be necessary to harmonize Section 1257 and Section 1651 in state courts?
It is a well-known problem that the Court’s interim rulings on stays and such can quickly eclipse any future rulings on the merits because once the Court says enough about its view of the merits, that generates a vertical precedent that effectively resolves the rest of the litigation. Perhaps it is especially important for the Court to be wary of that problem in stays to state court litigation, where its interim jurisdiction is strictly limited.
And, now, maybe this is a coincidence, but it is interesting that in Malliotakis the Supreme Court majority in fact said nothing about the merits (or anything else). By contrast, in the other interim ruling (Mirabelli) issued at roughly the same time, the Court wrote a per curiam opinion expressing a significant amount about the merits. Mirabelli was in the federal court system where the same finality limitations do not apply. Again, maybe it is a coincidence that the Court treated Malliotakis and Mirabelli so differently, but the different treatment might make sense in light of Section 1257’s looming presence in the background.
3: How should the Court exercise its discretion?
Finally, whatever the legal merits of this interpretation, we should be mindful that it might open up a new big zone of Supreme Court discretion. (Or even if that zone was always technically open, it might well lead to many more such applications, which in turn may lead to more discretionary decisions to grant and to deny, in a familiar dynamic on the shadow/emergency/interim docket.) Whether that is a good or a bad thing is obviously a matter of debate, and will depend in part on how the Court exercises that discretion, and whether it can do anything to dispel the impression that it is engaged in nothing more than ideologically-driven error correction. That is not a new problem, but it is not a solved problem either.
In any event, this interaction between the Court’s stay authority and its certiorari authority over state courts seems to me quite complicated, potentially significant, and worth more attention. Indeed, the potential relevance of the All Writs Act here might make figuring out the general principles of that statute (which are still very poorly understood) all the more important.
[Cross-posted from Divided Argument.]
The Supreme Court has taken a lot of heat in recent months over the high rate at which it has sided with the Trump Administration in interim docket cases. In his most recent post, Jack quotes James Comey offering a response to this criticism that Jack and others have made:
The Trump administration only goes to the circuit courts of appeals with a slice of its losses, and then it only asks the Supreme Court to get involved in an even smaller slice, something like a couple dozen out of hundreds of cases. They only ask the Supreme Court to hear cases they think they can win, so not many. All of that adds up to a misleading success rate in the Supreme Court . . . .
I think there’s much truth in this explanation—though at the same time I think there’s certainly something to the critics’ complaints. Even among the endogenously selected subset of lower court government losses brought to the Court, I’ve been dismayed by how much leeway the Court has given the Administration, and in how little weight the Court seems to put on some of the harm to individuals caused by letting some Administration policies remain in effect (for example, in the D.V.D. case).
Here, though, I’m putting that debate to the side. Accepting the premise that the government’s high success rate at the Court is driven by decisions by the Solicitor General’s Office—and SG Sauer himself—we’re still left with unanswered questions. Specifically, what are the determinants of Sauer’s decisions about which issues to bring to the Court?
Put differently—why would SG Sauer want to bring to the Court only those cases for which he believes that the Administration has a very strong chance of success?
Maybe I’m being obtuse, but the answer to that question is not obvious. And I think the answer likely depends on some combination of political, legal, strategic, and personal considerations for Sauer.
Consider a different strategy: what if the SG’s Office went to the Court every time the government lost in the lower courts? The Administration would surely have a worse victory percentage at the Court. At the same time, there has to be some chance that in a few of those cases, even if the legal arguments are not as strong, the Administration would win.
To flesh it out with a simplified and stylized hypo: imagine that the government loses 100 cases in the lower courts. For a subset of these cases (say, 30) the government has particularly strong arguments. If the SG’s Office seeks review of these—and only these—cases, it will obtain reversals of 80% of them—so, 24 victories, leaving in place 76 losses, but a 24-6 record if we only look at the Supreme Court.
What if the government seeks review of all 100 losses though? Imagine that for the other 70 cases, the government’s legal arguments are weaker—perhaps the government has only a 30% chance of winning. Even so, the government would end up with 21 victories in those “weak” cases on top of the 24 wins in the “strong” cases—producing a net record of 45 wins to 55 losses. Isn’t a 45-55 record better than a 24-76 one?
So there needs to be a deeper answer to why SG Sauer doesn’t take the “seek review of everything” strategy. Perhaps the most obvious explanation is limited resources—but I doubt that hat the SG’s Office isn’t so resource-constrained that it’s at the absolute limit of what cases it could ask the Court to review. I think that’s a reasonable assumption, though I recognize that resource constraints must play a role at some point.
The next most facially obvious explanation is credibility. Sauer is playing a long game, and he thinks taking cases to the Court where the government’s legal arguments are weak, he would harm the government’s effectiveness as an advocate in other, more important, cases down the road.
I don’t find that answer totally satisfying, however, for two reasons.
First, I am not sure the Court gives that much deference to the SG’s views of the law. The justices are all pretty confident of their legal views, have competent staffs, and are aided by amici in big cases. I don’t know whether the fact that the government made a legally weak argument in case X last year would actually make the justices less likely to rule against the government on a legal question in unrelated case Y today. (Credibility matters a lot for factual representations by the government, but I’m not sure that applies here).
Second, is there a competing risk that being overly cautious is actually hurting the government? The conservative majority is surely aware of the drumbeat of criticism arguing that they’re in the bag for Trump. One doesn’t have to be a total legal nihilist to think that, on the margins, the justices historically seem to have some impulse to split the difference—to temper wins for one side in the most politically divisive cases with a few losses. At the same time, there’s also reason to think that the Court recognizes it has finite political capital. The more the Court pushes back on the Administration, the greater the risk that the Administration pushes back on the Court.
Combining those observations, it seems to me that if you’re the government, one sensible strategy would be throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, on the assumption that (1) you’re going to lose some no matter what but (2) the Court may not feel comfortable ruling against you too much.
That’s obviously not the strategy this SG’s Office has pursued. Perhaps that’s because I’ve incorrectly weighed the costs and benefits (or, at least, maybe people in the Administration weigh them differently). But there also could be personal political calculations informing Sauer’s decisionmaking. Perhaps Sauer’s concerns for his own personal credibility with the Court as a litigator don’t fully line up with what’s in the interest of the government as litigant. Or perhaps the political dynamics behind the scenes mean that losses before the Court are perceived as particularly costly (and thus threatening to Sauer’s job security).
In any event, this line of inquiry calls to mind an old adage: “If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re probably spending too much time in airports.” Despite the stunningly aggressive legal positions this Administration is taking as a general matter, is it somehow possible that the government is being too cautious when it comes to the Court?
This essay is cross-posted at Executive Functions.
James Comey’s recent “short report card on the rule of law” said in concise form much of what I had been planning to write about the extraordinary checking function of the federal courts in response to the Trump challenge. In what follows I’ll draw on Comey’s arguments and phrasing and add points he does not address. (All quotations are from Comey unless otherwise indicated.)
Challenges
From the outset of Trump 2.0, federal courts confronted “so much bad behavior by two thirds of our government’s branches.” The administration “illegally inflicted tremendous pain on a lot of people.” And Congress “has gone missing”—elevating presidential fealty over its own institution and the Constitution, even in areas (like non-enforcement of the TikTok ban and the gutting of the appropriation power) where its prerogatives were being crushed.
The executive branch also displayed unprecedented hostility toward lower federal courts. It “in a whole lot of places and cases, act[ed] unlawfully and in bad faith,” and “lied and weaseled in all kinds of ways to avoid the effect of court decisions.” Congress added to the pressure. Some members threatened to eliminate or restrict federal courts in response to decisions. Speaker Mike Johnson called for impeachment over disliked decisions. All of this unfolded amid growing public threats of violence against judges.
Comey did not discuss the complementary and reactive excess, in substance and rhetoric, from some lower federal courts. I do not think the occasional extreme or performative behavior by lower courts—fixable on appeal—is representative. But it does feed administration narratives of judicial overreach.
In this milieu, the Supreme Court, sitting atop the third branch of the government, faces a dual challenge.
Horizontally, it must vindicate its view of federal law (including the proper scope of executive power) and ensure executive compliance with its decisions even though it has few tools beyond its words to do so. Vertically, it must impose doctrinal coherence on the decentralized lower courts that have divergent views on the legality of various executive branch actions. The Court’s hierarchical control allows it to correct lower-court errors and excesses. When a case arrives on the Court’s docket, it must choose when, how, and how quickly to intervene—with each choice involving many tradeoffs.
Trump’s Many Losses
Comey compared Trump’s early assault on the rule of law to a bungee jump.
The first phase seemed really powerful. Trump issued all kinds of illegal executive orders. Some big law firms caved, and it looked like Trump might defy court orders on deportations, and so the cord stretched way down into the canyon, scary stuff, but then, as bungee cords do, it snapped back in a big way, as people with an ethical spine and a view of history stood the hell up. And the main contributor to the standing up has been our judicial system.
The canyon was last winter and spring, when many people believed, with reason, that federal courts were being overrun by the Trump administration and widely defied.
Today, we are somewhere along the snap back. Looking at the last year from the perspective of February 2026, the judicial system definitely stood the hell up. The “culture of the federal judiciary is incredibly strong,” and “[n]o matter who appointed them, federal judges care deeply about their reputation for integrity and independence.” These judges have been “making decisions based on facts and law, and their orders are being followed.”
As a result, the administration “has lost in so many places, in so many ways, that it’s difficult to count,” though the rate of losses is surely “unheard of for the government.”
The Justice Department has been doing abysmally in its vengeful prosecutions. A federal court dismissed the indictments against Comey and Letitia James (both cases are before the Fourth Circuit). Other federal courts rejected attempts to install Trump-compliant U.S. Attorneys in Virginia and New Jersey. Beyond courts, grand juries have refused to indict more frequently than usual and juries have refused to convict in cases of suspected jury nullification.
Turning to civil lawsuits, the New York Times’s Trump administration litigation tracker (as of February 6, 2026) assesses more than 600 civil lawsuits. It concludes that in more than 350 of those, “the courts have let the administration’s policies stay in effect even as they remain in active litigation”; and that in more than 150 cases, “the courts have at least partially halted the administration’s policies either through temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions.” It also says that in the 128 cases finally decided, the Trump administration won five, the plaintiffs won 49, two received a mixed outcome, and 72 were “dismissed” (which is explained here).
Consider a few examples.
Some people will be surprised at the high Trump loss rate. Others will think it should be higher. But this much is undoubtedly true: The federal judiciary is checking the president forcefully. And it is doing so in the face of massive congressional and presidential hostility.
I say this despite the chaos and defiance of sorts in federal courts in Minnesota at the moment, which has happened in other courts during the last year. The judicial system in discrete cases is reactive and slow. The longer-term and broader picture of the federal judiciary, however, is clearly one of efficacy in holding the Trump administration accountable.
The Supreme Court
Comey addresses criticisms of the Supreme Court’s record along the lines that I and others have done:
The Trump administration only goes to the circuit courts of appeals with a slice of its losses, and then it only asks the Supreme Court to get involved in an even smaller slice, something like a couple dozen out of hundreds of cases. They only ask the Supreme Court to hear cases they think they can win, so not many. All of that adds up to a misleading success rate in the Supreme Court, and even that’s a bit deceptive, because most of the cases the Court has decided so far have been about what’s called injunctive relief, where lower courts acted on an emergency basis to stop something.
Many people look at the government’s 80 percent or so win rate on the interim orders docket and conclude that the Court is in the can for the Trump administration. That view is hard to square with the Court’s important stop signs in the immigration, domestic deployment, and Federal Reserve cases that the Trump administration cares about a lot.
Comey’s additional point is that the solicitor general with rare exceptions will not seek interim relief in cases he thinks it will lose. That means that the Court is exercising a kind of invisible influence on the Trump administration and the rule of law. The government mostly acquiesces in its staggering lower court loss rate—at least in not seeking interim relief, where likelihood of success on the merits looms large—because it knows it will lose in the Supreme Court.
To understand how well the federal courts have stood up to Trump, one must consider the judiciary as a system. The system is decentralized at the lower court level but hierarchical to the Supreme Court, which is largely responsible for where the law stands in the system at any particular time.
The Court has been harshly criticized for its Trump-related interim orders. The Court should also get credit for the invisible influence it has on the predictive judgment of the solicitor general that results in many, many dozens of lower court injunctions remaining in place against the administration. Richard Re in an essay last month describes other subtle ways that the Court influences the administration to comply with the law beyond its overt checking function. And then there are the handful of merits cases the Court has before it this term, most of which I think the Trump administration will lose.
***
In sum: The federal judicial system has done a remarkable job in the face of unprecedented challenges and hostility in standing up to the Trump administration. And the Supreme Court deserves a lot of credit for that.
None of this resolves debate about Supreme Court interim orders: Has the Court’s strong embrace of the unitary executive via interim orders been appropriate? Has the Court consistently applied its interim orders principles? Does it provide enough reasoning in its interim orders? And so on.
These questions provoke sharp disagreement. But that should not detract from the undoubted larger picture of the federal judiciary, including the Court, in the worst of positions, providing a real check on Trump lawlessness.
“[I]t’s not about whether I like every decision–after all, it’s not the rule of me,” said Comey, responding to criticisms of the Court’s interim orders. “[T]he test for the rule of law can’t be that I get only decisions I agree with.”
True. Also true, if we zoom out: “The System as a whole has stood tall.”
So far. Sometimes a bungee cord breaks.
Thanks to Tia Sewell for editorial assistance.
Dan and I recently posted an episode of our Divided Argument podcast analyzing the national guard case. In that discussion, I made a point that I wanted to emphasize here. One of the things really driven home by the fights about “party presentation” in Trump v. Illinois, and by what the majority chooses to resolve and chooses not to resolve, is how many different levels of analysis the Court can choose between.
The parties initially argued the case at Level One. The Court used its discretion to order further briefing and then go down to Level Two and resolve the “regular forces” question and then go down to Level Three and resolve the “unable” question. At that point they could have gone down to Level Four and Level Five, but they decided not to because they were insufficiently argued. But of course, that would also have been a reason to stop at level one initially!
And then notice that some of the disagreements among the other Justices are really about what level to go to. Justice Kavanaugh agrees with the majority that they should go from Level One to Level Two, and agrees about the answer to Level Two, but he would stop there rather than go to Level Three. Justice Gorsuch doesn’t necessarily disagree with the majority about the answers to Level Two or Level Three, but he notices how many more levels there are and then decides that’s a reason to stop back at Level One.
So for Justice Gorsuch, the application should be granted because he would stop at Level One, while for Justice Kavanaugh the application should be denied because he would stop at Level Two, and for the majority the application should be denied because they would stop at Level Three.
The answer to the question at any particular level may be law-governed and non-discretionary. But the choice of what level to go to, and thus the choice of what question to ask, is discretionary.
Discretion may be an inherent feature of the Court’s docket today, and especially so of the interim-relief docket. Indeed, once you look for it, this discretion about what questions to ask is ubiquitous. Why does Dobbs reconsider de novo the validity of Roe, but take as given the validity of Geduldig? Why did Nebraska v. Biden convert an application to vacate a universal injunction into a petition for cert. before judgment? And so on.
The national guard case really drives home the importance of discretion in how deep to go into the materials. At a minimum, this means that we should pay attention to how the Justices decide what level to go to. You could imagine a standard of strict party presentation — go to whatever level the parties choose. You could imagine a standard driven by legal clarity — go to whatever level seems easiest to resolve. You could imagine a standard driven by outcomes — figure out which side you want to win, then pick the level that makes that side win.
But it’s hard to evaluate the Court’s answers without thinking about how they decide what questions to ask.
[This post is cross-posted/adapted from the Divided Argument blog.]
After my last post, co-blogger Will Baude and another reader asked offline whether perhaps the word “interior” was doing work in Justice Kavanaugh’s footnote in Trump v. Illinois as a way to distinguish the seeming inconsistency between what he said there and his earlier discussion of the permissibility of relying on race in immigration stops in Noem v. Perdomo.
First, as a reminder, what Justice Kavanaugh said in Perdomo:
To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion [for an immigration stop]; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a “relevant factor” when considered along with other salient factors. [quoting United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S. 873, 887 (1975)].
Second, what he said in Trump v. Illinois (with the key word in bold):
The basic constitutional rules governing that dispute are longstanding and clear: The Fourth Amendment requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force. Moreover, the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity. Cf. Whren v. United States, 517 U. S. 806, 813 (1996) (“[T]he Constitution prohibits selective enforcement of the law based on considerations such as race”). This application does not require us to delve into the parties’ underlying dispute and to determine whether any particular immigration encounter or series of encounters in Illinois has violated those basic constitutional principles.
Is it possible that Justice Kavanaugh meant to suggest that the principle he announced in Perdomo only applies in non-“interior” contexts—presumably, areas near the border? A few thoughts.
First, Justice Kavanaugh’s statement in Perdomo does not contain any qualification suggesting he intended to limit the broad language there to non-“interior” areas.
But would such a distinction draw support in Fourth Amendment case law? The answer is quite possibly yes. The case that Justice Kavanaugh cited in Perdomo for the proposition that race can be a “relevant factor” in immigration stops, United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, explicitly considered the scope of “the United States Border Patrol’s authority to stop automobiles in areas near the Mexican border.” And that case explored factors that “may be taken into account in deciding whether there is reasonable suspicion to stop a car in the border area.”
Next, could that distinction help cabin what Justice Kavanaugh said on the facts of Perdomo itself? Maybe? The “border area” in Brignoni-Ponce was “a fixed checkpoint on Interstate Highway 5 south of San Clemente.” San Clemente itself is about 74 miles from the San Ysidro border crossing. Los Angeles is a little less than twice as far from the border—about 134 miles from the border crossing. So maybe you could argue that, to the extent that Brignoni-Ponce establishes a border-only rule, that rule would extend another hour-plus up Interstate 5 to cover Perdomo too—and that outside of the “border” context, authorities can’t rely on race at all in conducting stops.
Maybe, though I’m not sure that the distinction works on the facts of Trump v. Illinois. How might we define “interior” versus “border”? One place to start is immigration law. I’m not an immigration expert, but as I understand it: immigration law gives immigration authorities the power, among others, to “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States, to board and search for aliens any vessel within the territorial waters of the United States and any railway car, aircraft, conveyance, or vehicle,” and DHS has interpreted “reasonable distance from any external boundary” to mean “within 100 air miles from any external boundary of the United States.” That includes Los Angeles, but it also includes Chicago (given its proximity to Canada). So it’s at least arguable that Chicago is no more “interior” immigration-wise than LA is (although there may be far more illegal border crossings on the Southern border).
Moreover, if Justice Kavanaugh wanted to put forward that somewhat narrower view about the power to consider race in the Fourth Amendment/immigration context why not just. . . say so in Trump v. Illinois? It would be easy for him to have included a “see” or even “cf.” citation with a parenthetical quote from Brignoni–Ponce like the ones I offer above.
Instead, he cf.’ed to Whren v. United States, which is a Fourth Amendment case that most people read (critically) as saying that racial profiling doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment at all, even if it might violate the Equal Protection Clause. (“We of course agree with petitioners that the Constitution prohibits selective enforcement of the law based on considerations such as race. But the constitutional basis for objecting to intentionally discriminatory application of laws is the Equal Protection Clause, not the Fourth Amendment.”).
Justice Kavanaugh is a careful writer, so presumably he included the word “interior” for a reason. But I’m still left puzzled.
This highlights an ever-present tension in the Court’s interim rulings. Unexplained decisions are frustrating for parties, lower courts, and the public. But the more the justices write, on a tight timeline, the more questions and confusion they can create, which is frustrating too.
This essay is cross-posted at Executive Functions.
President Trump federalized the Illinois and Texas National Guard to protect federal personnel and property in and around Chicago. He relied on 10 U. S. C. §12406(3), which authorizes Guard federalization if the president is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.” A federal district court enjoined the deployment, which the Supreme Court yesterday declined to stay.
The Court ruled that the term “regular forces” in §12406(3) likely refers to the regular military. To call into service the Guard under §12406(3), therefore, the president must show that he is “‘unable’ with the regular military” to execute U.S. law. Justice Kavanaugh noted in concurrence that this ruling might have sufficed to deny the stay since Trump made no such determination.
But the Court went further. It reasoned that because the Posse Comitatus Act bars military law enforcement absent express authorization, the President must identify a statutory or constitutional authority for the regular military to execute the laws—and then show inability to do so—before federalizing the Guard under § 12406(3). The government’s failure to meet that burden, the Court said, justified denying the stay.
Some thoughts on the decision, ordered from the particular and narrow to the broader implications for domestic military deployment:
1. As Dan Epps noted, the Court took its time in ruling on this application for an interim order. It did not treat the matter as an “emergency.”
2. The district court had adopted the central interpretation of “regular forces” that ultimately persuaded the Court. But Illinois and other respondents did not defend that interpretation on appeal until the Supreme Court called for additional briefing that was almost certainly sparked by this forceful amicus brief by Marty Lederman.
3. The Court’s order ruled on the “likely” outcome of novel and difficult questions of federal law without oral argument or regular briefing. This is now a standard feature of the interim orders docket. But it has been much criticized by many commentators who will support the Court’s order, and by Justices who joined the order. Likewise, some of the dissenting Justices’ process objections did not bother them in other interim order contexts.
The lesson: process complaints about interim orders are often influenced by, and subordinate to, interim order outcomes. This doesn’t mean the process complaints are meaningless. It just means they are often opportunistic. Every justice agrees, when the merits pull is strong enough, that brief and largely conclusory interim orders appropriately issue, even in important cases, on the basis of truncated briefing and deliberation and without oral argument.
4. I agree with Justice Kavanaugh that the Court’s interpretation of “unable” involved a “complicated and debatable statutory analysis.” (It was more complicated than I let on in my summary above, and I’m not sure of the right answer.) As Justice Gorsuch noted in dissent, the Court “has never decided a case about the meaning of § 12406(3), let alone explored its interaction with other statutes in the field or the Constitution.” Justice Gorsuch also noted the Court did not “have much help on many of these matters from the parties’ briefs before us.”
Why, therefore, didn’t the Court, as Justice Kavanaugh suggested, seek further briefing, hold oral argument, or grant certiorari before judgment? Who knows. Every aspect of the interim orders process—timing of decision, standards for decision, the questions to answer, the robustness of briefing, whether to have oral argument or grant certiorari, the form of the order, guidance on remand, and more—is discretion-laden.
5. Because the Court’s interim orders have vertical precedential effect, yesterday’s order should end the government’s § 12406(3) national guard call-up not just in Illinois but in California and Oregon too. In that sense it is a major defeat for the Trump administration. But yesterday’s decision does not mean that Trump is out of options for domestic military deployment. Rather, as I wrote in October, he “has other more powerful legal authorities to deploy the Guard and regular armed forces in the domestic sphere”—options that the Court in yesterday’s order left open.
One option, I wrote earlier, is the “protective power”:
The protective power is the president’s inherent or independent Article II power to protect federal personnel, property, and functions. The key point is that the president can assert the protective power without reliance on Section 12406. He can deploy regular armed forces without any need to federalize the Guard. Presidents often have.
William Rehnquist, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote the leading executive branch opinion on the protective power in 1971. As Chris Mirasola explains in his outstanding definitive treatment of the issue, the protective power has a long pedigree in practice but an uncertain basis in Article II and Supreme Court case law. If the president relied on Article II alone to use regular armed forces for the protective function, it is hard to know what the Supreme Court would say about its validity or about the deference due to the president.
The Court discussed the protective power in yesterday’s order but did not take a view on it. If the government calls out the regular military to perform protective functions, we might get a first-ever Supreme Court ruling—at least since the nineteenth century decisions on which the government has long but precariously relied—on the nature and scope of the protective power.
A second and seemingly stronger option for Trump is to invoke the Insurrection Act, which authorizes the president to use the National Guard or the regular military in the domestic sphere in wide-ranging contexts, including (simplifying a great deal) as the president “considers necessary” to enforce federal law against unlawful “obstructions,” “combinations” or “assemblages” or to quell any “domestic violence” or “conspiracy” that impedes the enforcement of constitutional rights or even “the course of justice” under federal law.
The Insurrection Act provides the president with a number of potential advantages over federalizing the Guard under § 12406(3).
First, it authorizes deployment of the regular military in addition to the Guard. Second, its broadly worded triggers give the president wide discretion for its use. Third, a deployment under the Act skirts the Posse Comitatus Act bar by providing express authorization for the armed forces to engage in domestic law enforcement. Fourth, that enforcement authority is more robust than the protective power and applies beyond the immigration context as long as one of the Act’s vague predicates is met. Fifth, old precedents suggest that should give deference to the president’s determination that the Act’s predicates are met.
6. Yesterday’s defeat could provide “cover” for the Trump administration to go the Insurrection Act route. The central rationale for the Court’s order was that the government had not met its burden of demonstrating an affirmative authorization to use the regular military to enforce the law. Invocation of one of the Insurrection Act predicates would meet that burden. It would not be right for the administration to say “the Court made us do it”; but one can imagine the administration saying something like that nonetheless.
I do not mean to suggest that the administration will invariably win if it invokes the Insurrection Act. That depends on the facts on the ground and a slew of open questions under the Act and, possibly, the Constitution. Justice Gorsuch noted in dissent the “grave[]” question “[w]hen, if ever, may the federal government deploy the professional military for domestic law enforcement purposes consistent with the Constitution? See, e.g., Art. IV, §4; Amdt. 14, §5.” (emphasis supplied).
Nor do I predict that the administration will in fact invoke the Insurrection Act. Doing so brings some legal advantages but is politically very fraught at a time when the administration is encountering greater political headwinds. It might try the Article II regular military protective power gambit first the next time it claims to need to protect ICE facilities and functions.
Earlier today, the court issued its long-awaited ruling in Trump v. Illinois, denying the government’s application for a stay of the district court’s order barring the President from deploying the National Guard in Chicago. A few quick reactions:
1. The court really took its time to rule on this one. The application was fully briefed (including the supplemental briefing the court requested on the meaning of “regular forces”) was complete on November 17—more than a month ago. The majority opinion, such as it is, is quite short—barely 3 pages. Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence in the judgment is 7 pages; Justice Alito’s dissent is 16 pages; Justice Gorsuch’s dissent is 2 pages. None of those opinions should obviously have taken a month to craft, and the court often issues interim docket rulings with even lengthier dissents much, much more quickly. Here, because the court denied the stay, there was less urgency to get the ruling out, but it nonetheless seems like a long time. There’s no way to know, but I wonder if there was something odd at work—a decisive Justice waffling or even changing votes?
2. Justice Kavanaugh’s footnote 4 of his concurrence in the judgment is a bit puzzling. He goes out of his way to note:
The State and the Government disagree about whether the immigration officers have violated the Constitution in making certain immigration stops and arrests. The basic constitutional rules governing that dispute are longstanding and clear: The Fourth Amendment requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force. Moreover, the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity. Cf. Whren v. United States, 517 U. S. 806, 813 (1996) (“[T]he Constitution prohibits selective enforcement of the law based on considerations such as race”). This application does not require us to delve into the parties’ underlying dispute and to determine whether any particular immigration encounter or series of encounters in Illinois has violated those basic constitutional principles.
This footnote is a little hard to square with his concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, where he said the following:
To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion [for an immigration stop]; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a “relevant factor” when considered along with other salient factors.
I suppose the two statements are reconcilable if one interprets “based on” as “based on alone,” but in my view a more natural sense of that phrase is that a decision is “based on” a fact if that fact is a relevant (and perhaps decisive) factor in the decision.
Given the criticism Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion in Perdomo received—and the critics’ coinage of the derisive term “Kavanaugh Stops”—I wonder if this footnote (which I don’t think was strictly necessary to include) was an attempt to walk back his opinion in that case a tiny bit. Justice Kavanaugh seems more interested than other justices in using his opinions to speak to potential critics (which I actually find admirable) and that impulse may be playing a role here.
3. Justice Alito hammers the majority for disregarding the normal principle of “party presentation”—the basic idea that courts should only rule on arguments actually raised by the parties. (Interestingly, that point was reinforced in a summary reversal with no noted dissents barely a month ago, an opinion that Justice Alito cites front-and-center in his dissent.) There’s something to be said for that principle as a general matter where a case implicates the rights of only the actual parties; it’s perhaps reasonable to say that, in a habeas corpus case, a court shouldn’t rummage for arguments that the petitioner didn’t come up with and the government had no chance to respond to.
But courts generally have some discretion to consider arguments not raised at least in some contexts. And when the Supreme Court is ruling on a decision of this magnitude that affects many people who are not parties to the case, there’s a good case that it makes more sense to get the issue right regardless of what the parties argued. Moreover, in that situation, the court can (and did here!) request additional briefing, ameliorating unfairness concerns about springing a new issue on a litigant without providing an opportunity to respond. Indeed, in its merits cases, the court regularly appoints amici to argue positions that no party has advanced—presumably because the court recognizes that what matters is getting the issue right, rather than letting the outcome depend on the happenstance of what a particular litigant argued. And while Justice Gorsuch notes that he would have preferred to leave “weighty questions . . . for another case where they are properly preserved and can receive the full airing they so clearly deserve,” the court already decides major questions on the interim docket with no more airing (and in a much greater rush) than the “regular forces” argument received here.
4. This is extremely trivial and frankly pedantic, but are Justice Alito’s uses of double emphasis the first use of that stylistic choice in a SCOTUS opinion? I have to confess that on this score I’m a traditionalist and I do not approve.
5. Congrats to co-blogger Jack for receiving a lengthy footnote in Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion relying on one of Jack’s posts on his Substack, Executive Functions.
It looks like we have our first significant interim docket ruling since the launch of this blog, the denial of a stay, without noted dissent, in Margolin v. National Association of Immigration Judges. I do not think we can read too much into this denial, especially since it is “without prejudice to a reapplication if the District Court commences discovery proceedings before the disposition of the Government’s forthcoming petition for a writ of certiorari,” which might lead to a de facto stay of discovery below.
Still, the denial is notable for two reasons. First, given the Solicitor General’s track record of successes on the interim docket in recent months, any denial is notable.
Second, the reason for the denial: “At this stage, the Government has not demonstrated that it will suffer irreparable harm without a stay.” In the past few years, it had seemed like the Court was edging closer and closer to suggesting that the Government always could show irreparable harm almost automatically, building and building off of the old in-chambers statement that “[A]ny time a State is enjoined by a court from effectuating statutes enacted by representatives of its people, it suffers a form of irreparable injury.” Perhaps the Court is moving back to assessing irreparable harm with more nuance and precision, as it should.
Again, we should not read too much into such a brief and tentative disposition, but the issue of irreparable harm to the government is one to watch this term.
I’m excited to be part of the team kicking off the new Interim Docket Blog. For those who are new to tracking the Supreme Court’s work on the “interim docket,” you should read Jack’s inaugural post explaining what the interim docket is, and why we should call it that rather than the “shadow docket” or the “emergency docket.”
In my kickoff post, I’d like to suggest something worth keeping in mind when you encounter someone criticizing the Court for its work on this docket, whatever one calls it.
To explain, I’m going to rely on the classic film Annie Hall (which I did on a Divided Argument episode recently). At the beginning of the movie, Woody Allen begins with a classic Borscht Belt joke that he uses as a metaphor for life:
There’s an old joke. Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life: full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.
I think this captures something important about current debates over the interim docket—particularly, criticism that tends to use the ominous “shadow docket” label. The Court gets a lot of flak for how it uses the interim docket procedurally: It acts too quickly and provides insufficient explanations of why it’s doing what it’s doing. Call this the “small portions” problem. At the same time, many critics strongly dislike the substance of what the Court is doing via interim orders—what you can think of as the “terrible food” problem.
What’s important to see is that, much like the elderly women’s restaurant review, there’s a certain schizophrenia to these criticisms. People don’t like the decisions the Court is making, and want the Court to offer longer and more thorough explanations of those decisions. Now, one can believe both critiques simultaneously. If the Court is doing things that are substantively problematic, maybe it owes us all more of an explanation when it does so. And I believe both are true in some instances—there are things the Court is doing that deeply trouble me and cause real-world harm, and I’m also troubled by the Court’s seeming flippancy in doing some of those things on a rushed timeline with little or no explanation.
It’s also possible that there’s a direct relationship between the two problems. As Steve Vladeck notes in pushing back on the “interim docket” label, often the Court’s interim rulings are effectively, if not formally, final—such as where the Court stops a lower court from staying a deportation order. Perhaps in some such cases, having to go through the full process of briefing, oral argument, and a lengthy opinion might actually lead the Court to decide an important issue differently. I’m somewhat skeptical that this would happen much, if at all, but it’s a reasonable argument.
But sometimes “shadow docket” criticism may be more grounded in substantive, not procedural, disagreements with what the Court is doing. When the Court inevitably overturns Humphrey’s Executor in the Slaughter case, it’s going to get roundly criticized. And the fact that the Court previously granted a stay on the interim docket allowing the President to remove Rebecca Slaughter from the FTC, in violation of statutory law, will not figure prominently in those criticisms.
The lesson is that when you read or hear criticisms of the Court’s interim orders, ask what you see as the problem: substance, procedure, or both (or neither). If the Court were being slower and more deliberate, would the Court’s decision be equally problematic? Or is there a particularly distinct procedural problem that makes the “shadow docket” criticism especially apt in a particular case?
Welcome to the Interim Docket Blog, where Will Baude, Dan Epps, I, and surely others, will comment on Supreme Court interim orders and related matters.
An interim order is a non-final judicial decision that determines which party’s position controls in the interim between the filing of a lawsuit and its final resolution. That sounds boring and technical—and it is. But interim orders are where much of the action has been at the Supreme Court this year and for the last decade.
Consider executive power. The Court has a few important presidential powers cases on its merits docket. But it has issued dozens of interim orders this year related to presidential power, the vast majority of which the Trump administration has won. (Many of the wins did not turn on the scope of presidential power but rather ruled that executive action was being challenged in the wrong venue or by the wrong plaintiffs; but these rulings have supercharged the administration’s efforts to incapacitate the bureaucracy nonetheless.)
Interim orders are not decisions on the merits. But they can be hugely consequential. Continuing with the presidency example, they determine whether an executive branch program can operate, or not, during the months or years it takes for final resolution of a case. They often indicate the Justices’ views of the merits and thus preview how the case will eventually be decided. Sometimes they resolve an issue finally as a practical matter. And they can exert a magnifying stare decisis influence on lower federal courts despite typically containing very little explanation.
In short, interim orders—especially but not exclusively for issues of executive power—have emerged as a track parallel to merits decisions for the practical resolution of important federal questions. Yet interim orders tend to be harder to understand than merits decisions due to the paucity of explanation, the technical rules that govern their issuance, and their underlying complexity.
When a plaintiff challenges a presidential executive order, for example, it typically seeks an injunction in the district court. If the court grants the injunction, the government typically asks the court of appeals to “stay” it—that is, to suspend the order’s enforceability. If the court of appeals grants the stay, the plaintiff can ask the Supreme Court to vacate the stay; if it declines to grant it, the government may ask the Court to do so. Many other sequences can occur—for example, the district court denies injunctive relief, the court of appeals grants it, and the Supreme Court then stays the injunction.
One aim of this blog is to make interim orders more accessible and to situate them in the larger context of the Court’s work.
A final word on terminology. Interim orders are sometimes referred to as “emergency” orders. I explained in a recent essay why I thought this was misleading:
The “emergency” label, which connotes an urgent need for decision, misleads. Applicants sometimes characterize a request for a stay or injunction as an “emergency.” But often they do not. The tests for granting or vacating a stay or injunction do not fluctuate depending on how quickly the parties claim to need resolution. And the Court is under no compulsion to resolve the applications quickly. Sometimes it does, but often it takes a long time.
An example of the Court taking its time: The Solicitor General applied for a stay of the Illinois federal court’s National Guard injunction on October 17. After receiving an initial set of responses, Justice Barrett requested a round of supplemental briefing on October 29. That briefing closed on November 17. And as of this posting, still no decision—though it should come any day.
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