THE SHADOW PAPERS The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court
Secret memos obtained by The New York Times illuminate the origins of the court’s now-routine “shadow docket” rulings on presidential power.
The New York Times | April 18, 2026 | Jodi Kantor & Adam Liptak | Gift🎁link; no paywall.
"In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis."
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Just after 6 p.m. on a February evening in 2016, the Supreme Court issued a cryptic, one paragraph ruling that sent both climate policy and the court itself spinning in new directions.
For two centuries, the court had generally handled major cases at a stately pace that encouraged care and deliberation.... But this time, the justices were sprinting to block a major presidential initiative. By a 5-to-4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning. [....] That night marks the birth, many legal experts believe, of the court’s modern “shadow docket,” the secretive track that the Supreme Court has since used to make many major decisions, including granting President Trump more than 20 key victories on issues from immigration to agency power.
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