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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ripped her colleagues for fast-tracking cases on the high court’s emergency docket, saying “it has been noticeably less restrained, especially with respect to pending cases that involve controversial matters.”
The emergency docket, sometimes known as the shadow or interim docket, allows parties to ask the Supreme Court to quickly intervene in lawsuits and temporarily pause lower court rulings. The process can take a couple of days, weeks or months, and is viewed as a much speedier, although temporary, way to secure court relief than when the court fully considers the merits of a case, which can include a long briefing schedule and oral arguments.
“Why is it that one party should get a fast pass to the Supreme Court of the United States, when so many other parties are queued up, waiting patiently for the court’s attention?” Jackson said Thursday during a speech at the University of the District of Columbia’s law school, according to The Hill.
“If we’re not careful, the emergency docket can and will become an end run around the standard review process, a special avenue that certain privileged litigants can use selectively,” she added.
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Jackson’s speech comes as the Trump administration has submitted 40 emergency applications to the Supreme Court since the start of the president’s second term, The Hill reported.
Through the emergency docket, the Supreme Court has greenlit Trump’s mass firings of career employees and high-profile terminations of Democratic appointees. It has curtailed nationwide injunctions and cleared the way for controversial deportations and immigration stops.
Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has won about 80% of its appeals on the emergency docket, according to Politico.
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The Supreme Court’s majority has often split along ideological lines and offered little reason for its emergency decisions. This differs from final orders from the court, which can be lengthy and include numerous concurring opinions and dissents.
Jackson also said Thursday that parties should be required to prove impending harm in cases that cannot wait for full adjudication by the lower courts, as opposed to the Supreme Court granting stay applications based on whether lower courts could have made mistakes, Courthouse News Service reported.
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“Significant real-world harms can follow Supreme Court stay rulings, and when the court’s orders do not acknowledge that reality, they seem oblivious and ring hollow,” Jackson was quoted as saying. “We cannot expect the public to have faith in our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we are consistently greenlighting harmful acts that do real damage to litigating plaintiffs without a court decision fully and fairly determining the lawfulness of that challenged conduct on the merits.”
Fox News Digital’s Ashley Oliver contributed to this report.
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