Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has warned her colleagues that the Supreme Court risks damaging its reputation by using emergency dockets to make decisions.
Speaking to an audience at the University of the District of Columbia’s law school on Thursday night, Jackson said the nation’s highest court has used the docket—where rulings are made quickly, often without oral arguments and with little or no explanation—too often.
Jackson, a liberal justice nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden, said the Supreme Court will become more distrusted if it keeps ruling on cases without a full hearing, especially in cases that could harm the general public.
“We cannot expect the public to have faith in our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we are consistently green-lighting harmful acts that do real damage to litigating plaintiffs,” Jackson said, The Washington Post reported.
The speedy resolution and lack of transparency of emergency dockets have led critics to call it a “shadow docket.”
The Trump administration has used emergency dockets to ask the Supreme Court to quickly grant temporary relief after a lower court blocks its policies while the legality is argued further.
The emergency docket has been used to allow the Trump administration to move forward with plans to construct the president’s $400 million White House ballroom, fire tens of thousands of federal workers to cut costs, and to strip temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living in the U.S.
Earlier this year, a study found that the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration about 80 percent of the time when it appealed a lower-court decision via an emergency docket.
Jackson blasted the use of the docket by the conservative-majority SCOTUS, saying it has been “noticeably less restrained” when used in cases involving “controversial matters” pushed by the Trump administration.
“If we’re not careful, the emergency docket can and will become an end run around the standard review process, a special avenue that certain privileged litigants can use selectively,” she added, via The New York Times.
“Why is it that one party should get a fast pass to the Supreme Court of the United States when so many other parties are queued up, waiting patiently for the court’s attention?”
This is not the first time Jackson has publicly criticized the Supreme Court’s rising use of emergency dockets. In an April speech at Yale Law School, Jackson said that, in the late 1990s, SCOTUS almost exclusively used the docket to rule on cases involving death row inmates, not public policy.
“There is value in avoiding having the court continually touching the third rail of every divisive policy issue in American life,” Jackson said.
In a March debate with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of three SCOTUS justices nominated to the bench by Donald Trump, Jackson said that the court’s willingness to rely on the emergency docket for cases is a “real, unfortunate problem.”
The same night Jackson delivered her speech, Kavanaugh attended a White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping after being invited to the lavish event by Trump.
