https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/us/politics/judge-apology-conservative-justices.html
Since the beginning of President Trumpâs second term, the Supreme Courtâs conservative majority has sided with White House in nearly every case it has considered.
But it has done so relatively opaquely through more than a dozen emergency orders â unsigned opinions issued relatively quickly and without oral argument.
Emergency orders are intended to be temporary, outlining whether a policy can be implemented while its legality is still being litigated. In practicality, the courtâs orders â often encompassing a few paragraphs and little legal reasoning â have allowed the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people and the elimination of billions in government spending. [...]
Before the Supreme Court acted, Judge Young had ruled in June that the grants could not be canceled, heaping scorn on the Trump administrationâs decision to terminate those grants en masse based on what he described as discriminatory motives. [...]
But in the Supreme Courtâs order, the two justices suggested that Judge Young had ignored the way the court already addressed the question of terminated grants in the earlier case.
âLower-court judges may sometimes disagree with this Courtâs decisions, but they are never free to defy them,â Justice Gorsuch wrote.
âWhen this court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts,â he added.
Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University who has written about the case, said in an email that the Supreme Court had put the onus on judges to divine its intentions despite issuing exceptionally short and vague orders. He added that the justices themselves have been inconsistent about whether emergency orders should be considered binding on lower courts, with Justice Samuel Alito saying during a speech in 2021 that âa ruling on an emergency application is not a precedent.â
âThe less the court writes, the harder it is to argue that it is âclearâ that a ruling in a prior case applies to a subsequent case with even slightly different facts,â Mr. Vladeck said.
Despite Tuesdayâs display of contrition, Judge Young, 84, who was confirmed as a federal judge before either of the justices who had scolded him started law school, said the justicesâ rebuke was like nothing he had seen in nearly five decades as a judge.
âI have served in judicial office now for over 47 years,â he said. âNever before this admonition has any judge in any higher court ever thought to suggest that this court had defied the precedent of a higher court â that was never my intention.â
He went out of his way to stress that it was never clear to him that the courtâs emergency ruling in the education case represented its thinking in other instances of federal grants the Trump administration has slashed since January.
âI simply did not understand that orders on the emergency docket were precedent,â he said. âI stand corrected.â
Courtly Observations is a recurring series by Erwin Chemerinsky that focuses on what the Supreme Courtâs decisions will mean for the law, fo
[In the most recent term] the court decided 56 cases with signed opinions after briefing and oral argument. This seems to be the new normal for the court. Last year, the court decided 59 merits cases. In each of the two years prior to that, the court decided 58 cases. The term before that it was 54, and the year before that it was 52, which was the smallest number since 1862.
To put this in perspective, in the 1980s, the court was deciding over 160 cases a year. The smaller docket began when William Rehnquist was chief justice. In his last year, October Term 2004, the court decided 85 cases. When John Roberts went before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the summer of 2005 for his confirmation hearing, he was asked about the smaller docket. He lamented it. He had been a Supreme Court litigator and said that the court should decide at least 100 cases a year. Never in his 20 years as chief justice has the court come close to the 85 merits cases of Rehnquistâs last term. On the other hand, as discussed below, the size of the emergency docket has increased enormously. [...]
A year ago, the Supreme Court decided 44 matters on its emergency, or as it is often called, âshadow docketâ. This term, the court has 113 matters on the emergency docket (and that surely will increase over the summer as the term officially continues until the next term begins in October). That is a stunning increase in just one year. Of course, the easiest explanation is the number of applications involving challenges to President Donald Trumpâs actions.
I am among those with great concerns about the court effectively deciding major issues without full briefing and oral argument on its emergency docket. Sometimes the court decides without even writing an opinion, such as in Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. on June 23, which allowed the Trump administration to deport individuals to South Sudan despite their not having any connection to that country. It also is troubling that the court pays little attention to rules limiting appellate review of temporary restraining orders and to the usual standards of appellate review, which limit overturning preliminary injunctions to when there is an abuse of discretion by the trial court. Also, it is unclear what, if any, precedential weight lower courts must give to opinions from the emergency docket.
The balls and strikes guy is currently overseeing the systematic dismantling of the concept that evidence, argumentation, and explicit reasoning are essential to the legal system
stormborns
theartofmadeline
ellievsbear
annaxmalina
baratheonpilled
pixelskylines
