By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used a public appearance this week to take her own court to task, warning that the Supreme Court's growing reliance on its emergency docket — the so-called "shadow docket" — risks undermining the institution's credibility.
Jackson called the practice "problematic" and urged her colleagues toward more restraint, according to The Washington Post. The New York Times reported she went further in a speech, describing the trend as "potentially corrosive" — pointed language for a sitting justice to use about her own court's procedures, delivered just hours after she had fielded the Trump administration's latest emergency application.
The emergency docket allows the Court to issue rulings, often unsigned and without full briefing or oral argument, on requests for immediate relief — a mechanism that has seen dramatically increased use as the Trump administration has repeatedly sought fast-track intervention on policy disputes making their way through lower courts. Critics across the ideological spectrum have argued the practice lets the Court make consequential decisions with minimal transparency about its reasoning.
Jackson's comments do not describe a specific pending case by name in available reporting, and neither the Post nor the Times account details what remedy, if any, she proposed beyond urging "more restraint." It is also not clear from these reports whether other justices have publicly responded.
Still, a sitting justice publicly criticizing her own court's internal practices is unusual, and it lands amid mounting scrutiny — from lawmakers and legal scholars alike — of how much power the emergency docket has quietly accumulated. Whether her colleagues take the criticism to heart is, for now, an open question.
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by The Washington Post and The New York Times.
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