The Supreme Court issued more substantive emergency orders than signed decisions in argued cases during the term that ended in October 2025, according to a ProPublica analysis. That marks a sharp shift in how the court does some of its most consequential work: faster, with less briefing, usually without oral argument, and often without telling the public how each justice voted.
ProPublica found 63 rulings on the court’s so-called shadow docket, compared with 56 decisions on the merits docket, where cases are argued in open court and resolved through signed opinions. The analysis covered more than two decades of Supreme Court records, spanning Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure and the period available through the court’s online docket.
The emergency process lets parties ask the justices to step in before ordinary appeals are finished, often to pause a lower-court order or let a government policy proceed while litigation continues. Many emergency applications are routine procedural requests or death penalty matters. ProPublica said it excluded those categories to focus on substantive requests asking the full court to intervene in the normal appeals process.
The result is a court making major decisions with a thinner public record. ProPublica reported that only 17% of votes it examined on the shadow docket had any public indication of a justice’s vote or opinion.
The shift has been especially consequential for President Donald Trump’s administration. ProPublica reported that the court has repeatedly allowed Trump policies to take effect after lower courts blocked them, often with little explanation. A White House spokesperson told ProPublica that Trump had faced an unprecedented number of injunctions from “liberal lower court judges” and would continue implementing the agenda on which he was elected. The Supreme Court did not respond to ProPublica’s detailed questions.
Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and Supreme Court analyst, told ProPublica that the pattern gives the appearance that the court is enabling Trump and deciding cases according to political preference. He called that appearance damaging to the court’s credibility.
The Trump administration has used the emergency docket far more aggressively than recent predecessors, according to data cited by ProPublica. The Brennan Center for Justice found that the George W. Bush and Obama administrations together filed eight such petitions over 16 years. Trump’s administration filed 32 in 2025 alone.
The orders have touched immigration, elections and the power of lower federal courts. In June 2025, after a lower court said eight men facing deportation to South Sudan should receive due process, the Supreme Court granted the administration’s request to halt that order, according to ProPublica. The men were deported, and the majority did not issue an opinion explaining its reasoning.
Three months later, the court allowed immigration agents to stop people based on racial or ethnic characteristics while litigation continued. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that people lawfully in the country would be “free to go after the brief encounter.” ProPublica reported last year that more than 170 U.S. citizens had been stopped and detained by ICE agents, and that more than 50 Americans held after agents learned of their citizenship were almost all Latino.
In May, the justices let Louisiana immediately redraw its election map while an election was already underway, removing one of two majority-Black districts. ProPublica reported that the state can use the map in the 2026 midterms.
The court’s own members have split publicly over the practice. Justice Elena Kagan criticized the shadow docket in a 2021 dissent after the court declined to block Texas’ six-week abortion ban. Justice Samuel Alito has argued that parties, not the court, file emergency applications. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said in an April speech at Yale Law School that unexplained emergency orders can undermine public faith in the judiciary.
ProPublica said Roberts has referred more substantive emergency matters to the full court than any other justice, rising from one referral in the 2005 term to nearly half of all referrals in the most recent term. Democrats led by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland have sponsored legislation aimed at making shadow docket rulings more transparent.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.