A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
The Supreme Court holds more power than it used to and, thanks to its “shadow docket,” can make consequential decisions that affect every American without so much as a written decision.
That’s my takeaway from a fascinating and educational new book by Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas who is also a CNN contributor.
I talked to Vladeck about “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” which publishes on May 16. Excerpts of our conversation, conducted by phone, are below.
WOLF: Can you explain to people what you mean by “shadow docket”?
VLADECK: The term is not mine. It was coined by University of Chicago law professor Will Baude in 2015.
Will meant it really as this umbrella term. Not as a pejorative, but just as a description of the fact that the vast majority of rulings that the Supreme Court hands down that we don’t pay attention to.
They’re not the fancy decisions on the merits docket. They’re not the cases where the court hears oral arguments and writes these lengthy rulings with concurrences and dissents.
The typical shadow docket ruling is an unsigned, unexplained order. And most of them are banal. But not all of them.
Will’s insight, which I have rather shamelessly appropriated, is that there’s a lot of really important stuff that happens through unsigned, unexplained orders. Just because they’re unsigned and unexplained doesn’t mean that we ought not to care about them, talk about them, study them and try to divine broader patterns from them.
WOLF: You write about how the court, without explaining itself, either invalidated or influenced congressional…
Read the full article here