The blocking of a majority-Black congressional district in Alabama. OSHA regulations requiring vaccinations or a negative COVID test result. A law in Texas banning abortions after six weeks. All of these controversial issues were decided not through the tried-and-true method of a hearing in the Supreme Court, but rather through a system called "the shadow docket," orders from the court that are (often) unsigned, inscrutable, and handed down in the middle of the night. Professor Stephen Vladeck takes us through this increasingly common phenomenon.
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Transcript
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Nick Capodice: And the more shows we do, the more it feels that the wheels of government are powerful but slow. So if you want to get something done, the reason perhaps you decided to get involved in politics in the first place, it might be easier to just use a shortcut. You don't want to write a bill cut and paste from another.
Hannah McCarthy: One states because I didn't realize just how many copycat bills there are out there right now.
Nick Capodice: You don't want to go through the rigamarole of amendments in a House vote. Do it under suspension of the rules. Mr. Speaker, I moved to suspend the rules and pass HR 2663. You want to pass a bill in the Senate without debate, without filibuster? Do it under unanimous consent.
Speaker3: I ask unanimous consent that the Senate consider the following nomination calendar numbers.
Nick Capodice: Five 3434. Oh, you're the president and you just don't want to involve Congress at all. Just sign an executive order. I'm on executive order, and I pretty much just happen. But the one entity that was, to my knowledge, unable to use shortcuts was the one which determines how the Constitution applies to us. America's final arbiter, the Supreme Court.
Hannah McCarthy: And let me guess how wrong that you were.
Nick Capodice: How wrong was I?
Speaker4: Hi again, everyone. It's 5:00 in New York following the Supreme Court's refusal to block Texas's new law that all but bans abortion in the state. There's been a barrage of criticism and harsh scrutiny over the Supreme Court's shadow docket.
Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics one on one. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And today we're talking about the shadow docket, Supreme Court decisions that we know very little about.
Stephen Vladeck: Justice Amy Coney Barrett gave a speech in April at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library where she said, you know, you guys think we're all partizan hacks, but like, don't just read the media, like, read our opinions, you know, decide for yourselves.
Hannah McCarthy: It's also perfectly fair game to say that the court got it wrong. But I think if you're going to make the latter claim that the court got it wrong, you have to engage with the Court's reasoning first. And I think you should read the opinion and see, well, does this read like something that was.
Stephen Vladeck: Purely to which my response is great. What if there's no opinion to read?
Nick Capodice: This is Steven Vladeck. He holds the Charles Allen Wright chair in federal courts at University of Texas School of Law. He has a book on the shadow docket coming out spring of 2023. He has also testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the shadow docket.
Hannah McCarthy: And this is quite the introduction.
Nick Capodice: I promise it's worth it. And he has argued in front of the Supreme Court three times.
Hannah McCarthy: How'd he.
Stephen Vladeck: Do?
Nick Capodice: 043043. Quick, funny. Civics aside, the first time he was in the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy threw him the heaviest curveball ever. Do you think Marbury versus Madison is right? But particularly as to.
Hannah McCarthy: That is a hilarious and impossible question to answer before the Supreme Court. And the reason it's hilarious is because Marbury versus Madison is the case where the Supreme Court gave itself the power to rule on constitutionality. So it's like the case that defined what the Supreme Court is. Okay, but let's get back to the shadow docket. What does this term mean?
Stephen Vladeck: The term was actually coined in 2015 by a professor in Chicago named Will Bode. And it's not meant to be nefarious. It's really an umbrella term that's supposed to cover basically all of the stuff that the US Supreme Court does. Other than the big fancy merits rulings that it hands down every year. So we spend a lot of time every May and June talking about big rulings on affirmative action, abortion, same sex marriage, guns, campaign finance. You know, pick your favorite socially divisive issue.
Hannah McCarthy: We've done, what, like 15 episodes on socially divisive Supreme Court decisions?
Nick Capodice: Yeah, like more maybe from Dred Scott to Roe to Tinker to Citizens United. These massive decisions that affect our daily lives. And we love learning about those. We love talking about those. And as each spring comes to a close, as May turns into June, the nation waits with bated breath to see those new rulings come down.
Speaker4: We have breaking news from the Supreme Court. It is a landmark decision for the LGBTQ community. The justices ruling that it is illegal for workers to be dismissed from.
Stephen Vladeck: And the reality is that those 60 to 70 rulings are a tiny fraction of the Supreme Court's total workload, that most of the work the court does is through unsigned, unexplained summary orders that are public. So it's not like they're inaccessible, but they're inscrutable. I mean, you know, even with a law degree, it's hard to figure out what to make of them. And, you know, when Professor Bode coined the term in 2015, he wasn't trying to suggest that anything especially nefarious was afoot. Rather, his point was just that we ought to be paying more attention to that side of the court's work.
Hannah McCarthy: So when we use the term shadow docket, we're talking about work that the Supreme Court does. That's not the tried and true ruling on an opinion.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, and Supreme Court justices have been doing this work since the beginning of our nation. And just to be clear, I want to put air quotes around the term shadow docket. Not everybody uses that term. Justice Samuel Alito has actively criticized it, saying the term insinuates something sinister.
Hannah McCarthy: But it is a relatively new term because I haven't heard of it before. Why are we suddenly talking about this now?
Nick Capodice: Right. So the court has stepped in to decide things on an emergency basis for a long time. I've got some famous examples. In 1953, the court stepped in to halt the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage and then allowed it to continue the next day. Likewise, Justice Stephen Douglas ordered a halt of bombing in Cambodia in 1973, but then he was soon overruled by the whole court. These were both shadow docket orders. But to your question, we're talking about it a lot more now because there has been a big increase in orders of the court that are political in nature, not just sort of run of the mill procedural stuff.
Hannah McCarthy: Well, how does that look? How does shadow docket decisions differ from the ones that we've talked about before.
Nick Capodice: The kinds of cases that we watch out for and talk about on the show? Those are called merits cases. And just to juxtapose the difference between that and the shadow docket. Let's go through the journey of a Merritt's case. Hannah, you broke the law.
Hannah McCarthy: What did they do?
Nick Capodice: You know what you did. You did something you shouldn't have, and you were fine.
Hannah McCarthy: I did something I shouldn't have.
Nick Capodice: Hypotheticals are very difficult. You argue that the thing you did is speech. It's protected by the First Amendment and that the law you broke is unconstitutional. So it goes to one of the 94 federal district courts. Lawyers do research. Your case is argued, you lose. But you're a fighter, Hannah. You don't give up so easy. You appeal it up to the circuit court and hear lawyers write briefs, wonderful, succinct documents outlining their legal reasoning. Three judges read those briefs. They have lawyers in. They ask him some questions, and then they affirm the lower court's decision. They say, Yeah, that law is legit and constitutional. Hannah, you shouldn't have done what you did, and you deserve that. Fine. But you don't take that sitting down and your lawyer petitions for a writ of certiorari, asking the Supreme Court to hear your case. Now they get about 8000 cert petitions every year. They only pick about 60. The odds are not in your favor. But lo and behold, four out of nine justices agree. Yeah, we need to weigh in on that McCarthy case. It's scheduled to be heard in the highest court of the land. You've got more briefs. You've got Amichai Friends of the court brought in to testify. There's an hour long argument. Justices deliberate. And then when May finally rolls around, they read their opinion. You see how each justice voted. And the whole thing took a couple of years.
The court will now read its opinion in the case of McCarthy of Braintree, the question of determining speech actions, especially related to those who host public radio podcasts, is complex and worth lengthy consideration.
Nick Capodice: By contrast, what we call a shadow docket ruling would be that a party could skip that entire process by appealing directly to the Supreme Court to issue an emergency order. No arguments, no opinion, no signatures, just an order sent late at night.
Hannah McCarthy: Like it actually happens late at night.
Nick Capodice: Not always, but often. Yeah.
Stephen Vladeck: There was this pattern, especially, gosh, in 2020, 2021, where we had like 10 p.m., 11 p.m., 11:58 p.m., 2:17 a.m.. I don't think that's, you know, to me that's not the hill to die on. Like, yes, they come out late at night if everything else was fine about them. The fact that come out late at night would not be a problem. But I think it reinforces how much of a departure it is from the court's normal operating procedure to be handing down orders like this outside of that flow. So the the joke about the book is that, you know, if I'm really being faithful to everything, the book will be one inscrutable page handed down at 11:58 p.m. on a Friday night, but I don't think my publisher is going to go for that gag.
Hannah McCarthy: What sorts of cases do they decide this way?
Nick Capodice: Stephen gave me a few recent examples. Yeah.
Stephen Vladeck: I mean, so, you know, last September, when the Supreme Court refused to block Texas's controversial six week abortion ban, that was on the shadow docket, you know, in January, when the court blocked the Biden administration's OSHA rule to require large employers to have a vaccinator test requirement that was on the shadow docket in February when the court put back into effect congressional district maps in Alabama that two different lower courts had held to violate the Voting Rights Act. That was on the shadow docket. So, you know, we're just seeing so many more of these decisions that are producing immediate, massive, real world effects that the justices are handing down. You know, not always without explanation, but with far less explanation, with far more truncated explanations, and in context in which at least historically, they weren't supposed to issue relief, they weren't supposed to upset the apple cart unless particular things were true. That don't appear to be true. So we're seeing just this. It's no one thing by itself. It's the rise of so many more of these rulings, having so many so much broader effects in context that are both inconsistent and increasingly in seeming defiance of the court's own rules for what it's doing.
Nick Capodice: And we're going to get into what people see as problems with the shadow docket, as well as some numbers on how much more prevalent these decisions have been in the last few years right after the break.
Hannah McCarthy: But first, Nick and I just want to tell you that civics one on one is listener supported. If you like our show and our mission to simplify the tangles of governmental systems, make a donation at our website civics101podcast.org. We don't mind if you do it late at night. All right, we're back. And we're talking about the shadow docket. So, Nick, you said these sorts of emergency decisions have been happening for hundreds of years, but lately there has been a big increase. Like, how big are we talking.
Nick Capodice: During the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations combined? We're talking about 16 years total. There was a grand total of eight cases where the federal government appealed directly to the Supreme Court for emergency relief. But in the Trump administration.
Stephen Vladeck: In four years, the Trump administration went to the Supreme Court 41 times. Now, folks disagree about whether that's because lower courts were out to get Trump or because Trump's policies were terrible. Right. Shockingly, that tends to break down on how you feel about President Trump. But what no one can dispute is how much that turbo charges stems and how much that really sort of ratcheted up the pressure on the shadow docket when the federal government, the most common influential player in the Supreme Court. Right, is going back to the well over and over again, asking the justices for this kind of relief.
Hannah McCarthy: You know, one of the most controversial decisions that Stephen mentioned was the court's refusal to block Texas's six week abortion ban.
Nick Capodice: Making news out of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has issued an opinion on that major abortion case out of Texas. The justices by a conservative majority have decided to allow that law in Texas, which effectively bans nearly all abortions in that state to remain.
Hannah McCarthy: But to me, there's a major difference here, because that's not the court doing something. That's the court not doing something. Can we consider inaction the same as action when it comes to the shadow docket?
Stephen Vladeck: The problem is, is that if the court had not spent the previous year reaching out over and over again to block California and New York COVID restrictions in context in which historically the court had sat on its hands right then. I think the SB eight rule and the Texas abortion ruling from September would be a lot more defensible. But when the court says over here, we're going to intervene over and over and over again in context where we never have before, and the context in which we probably aren't even allowed to. But over here we're not going to intervene because our hands are tied by the same things that we weren't bound by in those other cases.
Hannah McCarthy: You know, when we talk about members of the Supreme Court doing things that fall in line with one party or another, I'm reminded of a quote that you used in your episode on the judicial branch. It was said by Chief Justice Roberts, quote, We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges that we have an independent judiciary.
Stephen Vladeck: Well, and the irony is and Chief Justice John Roberts line about how there are no Obama judges and there are no Trump judges. Was in a case the court resolved through a shadow docket order.
Nick Capodice: But regardless, I'm very glad you brought up Roberts, because one of the arguments made in favor of these shadow docket decisions is, hey, you're just angry because we have a conservative majority court, right? If it was five four the other way, progressives would totally be fine with it. But Roberts demonstrates that isn't necessarily true.
Stephen Vladeck: I actually think the chief justice is a really remarkable figure here, because John Roberts, who is no one's idea of a liberal. Right, who is a dyed in the wool establishment Washington conservative, has been this fascinating player as the court's center of gravity has shifted. So when Anthony Kennedy was still on the court and Kennedy was the median vote. Roberts We very rarely saw Roberts as the key player in a shadow docket ruling.
Nick Capodice: But once Justice Kennedy retired in 2018, Roberts became that median vote. And where he went, so too did the court.
Stephen Vladeck: And what that meant was that in the early part of the COVID cases, where there were these claims for, you know, religious liberty challenges to COVID restrictions, Roberts Was the key vote in joining the liberals and not allowing those challenges. And what he kept saying over and over again, it's not that I. Roberts am unsympathetic to these claims. It's that these are this is not the context for vindicating them that we should not be using emergency orders to reach these hard, difficult, challenging questions. You know, those should be merits cases.
Nick Capodice: And as a result, those challenges did not go through. They just weren't successful. But in September of 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, intends to pick this woman as his Supreme Court nominee to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her name is Amy Coney Barrett. She met with the president at the White House Monday.
Stephen Vladeck: So when Justice Barrett is confirmed to replace Justice Ginsburg, Roberts is no longer the median vote. And as early as one month into Barrett's tenure, we see Roberts joining the liberals. In the case after case, what we're seeing on the chief do, he's writing separately and he's saying, I'm sympathetic to this challenge. I don't like what the state is doing. I have problems with this, but not this. The shadow docket is not where we should block it. We saw this again in February in the Alabama redistricting case where John Roberts, no fan of the Voting Rights Act. Right. He wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County that tore a big hole in the Voting Rights Act. Roberts says, You know, I think we might want to revisit our interpretation of this provision of the Voting Rights Act, but the shadow docket is no place to do it.
Nick Capodice: Roberts was then on the losing side of five four shadow docket decisions seven times.
Hannah McCarthy: These five four decisions are the justices pretty much voting along ideological lines.
Nick Capodice: And all the shadow docket decisions Stephen talked about. It was the same five in the majority Justices Barrett, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Thomas.
Stephen Vladeck: And then finally in this Clean Water Act case in early April, right for the first time, he doesn't just dissent in one of these cases, but he actually joins Justice Kagan, who has been repeatedly criticized in the majority for, in her terms, abusing the shadow docket. Now, we finally have John Roberts endorsing that critique. And I just you know, I don't know how you look at John Roberts and and his now criticism of the shadow docket and say that this is ideological. Right. Because if if John Roberts, who actually is sympathetic to these religious liberty claims, is sympathetic to the voting rights claims, doesn't like abortion. Right. Is with the other conservatives on the merits in all of these cases and keeps dissenting because he thinks they're taking shortcuts. If that's not a message about how broken this is, I don't know what is. And, you know, I don't think it's enough of an answer, as I think so many conservatives are want to do, to say, oh, well, Roberts is a squish. You know, no, he's been clear that he's with them on the merits. He just said there's a right way and a wrong way to do it.
Hannah McCarthy: Hang on. What does Squish?
Nick Capodice: Squish is a term that goes back to the Reagan administration. Politicians use it to describe members of their own party who sort of hem and haw who can't be counted on to back controversial initiatives.
Hannah McCarthy: Can we just stop here for a minute? Because my big question is, if we make the assumption that the same five justices vote one way and the same for the other, couldn't we just say that the shadow docket is speeding up the inevitable? Like, sure, we don't know for certain how a justice is ever going to vote, but if it's about a big social issue like abortion, we've got a pretty good idea. So what does Steven think is the biggest problem with decisions made this way?
Stephen Vladeck: It starts with a basic proposition, which is that what makes a court, a court is its ability to defend itself, is its ability to provide a rationale for its decision.
Hannah McCarthy: In other words, the reason the Supreme Court can be the Supreme Court is that it lays out its reasoning for its decisions.
Nick Capodice: Yes. And that is Stephen's first problem.
Stephen Vladeck: So, you know, problem number one is that the absence of any rationale deprives the public of the opportunity to access the principles to assess them not not necessarily for agreement or disagreement, but for whether we think the court is doing legal, judicial things. Problem number two is, the less the court writes, the easier it is for to be inconsistent. When the court at time one rules for one party one way and writes 50 pages as to why it's very easy for a different party at type two to say, look what you wrote in that case, right? We're now in the same situation. We should therefore win. Well, if the court has written nothing that it's not bound by what it didn't write at time. One.
Hannah McCarthy: So if these shadow docket decisions are happening with the same five justices in the majority, how will it end? Will decisions made outside of merits cases continue to be more and more common?
Nick Capodice: Maybe there's just no way of knowing how this will change as justices enter and leave the court. And Steven told me that for those who are critical of this uptick in shadow docket decisions, there are three steps that could result in it changing.
Stephen Vladeck: So I think step one is getting folks to realize that this really is a big deal and that it's not strictly partizan or ideological, that there are entirely neutral reasons to be deeply concerned with how the Supreme Court is behaving. Step two is more self awareness on the part of the courts. And then if neither of those succeeds, step three is Congress really ought to start thinking seriously about how it relates right to the core as an institution and why, when we talk about Supreme Court reform, we shouldn't be distracted by the big ticket, but never going to happen. Items like Adams's to the court or term limits. We really should be focused on the far more important, palatable and possible technical reforms that actually might reallocate some of these dynamics.
Hannah McCarthy: Nicky started with the wheels of government to bring this back to the wheel, to the big, powerful, slow wheel of government. I can understand people wanting to dodge that wheel to get things done quickly.
Nick Capodice: I can, too. But if everybody's dodging the wheel, why do we have a wheel in the first place? All right. Well, you can't tell by listening to it, but in honor of this episode, I'm recording these credits late at night. After everyone's asleep, you can maybe hear my washing machine in the background, and that'll do it for this episode. And the shadow docket. I tried to put in a midnight judges joke, but I just couldn't figure out how to do it. This episode was written and produced by me. Nick Capodice with Hannah McCarthy. Our staff includes Jackie Fulton. Christina Phillips is our senior producer and Rebecca Lavoy, our executive producer. Music In this episode by the old greats Blue Dot Sessions, Ezra, Peter Sandberg, Apollo, the New Fools, Christian Anderson, Halston, Cisco, Juanita's, Ari De Niro, Jesse Gallagher and the Man Who Never Missed the Swiss Missed Christmas List, Chris Zabriskie. Civics one on one is a production of HPR New Hampshire Public Radio shadow.