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Gift article: No paywall

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/opinion/supreme-court-emergency-rulings.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Z08.Irh-.kt6JIwxPFdWD&smid=nytcore-android-share

"The credibility of judges depends on their ability to offer public explanation for the legal basis of their decisions. When judges show their work, the public can assess it by the standards the judiciary sets for itself — reasoning grounded in law and judicial precedent. Without that, judges risk their legitimacy. Clear explanation is especially important for the Supreme Court, which sets national rules. When the court fails to make these rules clear, confusion can set in.

The current Supreme Court is creating precisely this problem by issuing many important rulings as brief, unsigned orders on its so-called emergency docket. On this shadow docket, the votes among the nine justices are not public, and the majorities typically offer little explanation for their decisions. Yet the justices have used the emergency docket this year to hand down a series of rulings allowing President Trump to expand executive power and alter the structure of government.

In following this path, the justices are ducking one of their crucial responsibilities: making persuasive public arguments.

The first problem is the lack of explanation, which leaves the public unable to assess the justices’ reasoning and lower courts and policymakers uncertain about the full meaning of the rulings.

The second problem is the perception of Supreme Court partisanship, which the emergency docket exacerbates via speculation & lack of individual accountability.

The third problem is that the Supreme Court is using this docket to make itself more powerful, too, deciding many of the country’s most pressing political questions in real time. This is a power grab, in which the justices reduce the role of lower courts, where judges are more evenly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees than the justices are.