A term that ended last October saw the Supreme Court decide more cases on its shadow docket—fast-track emergency rulings made through secret ballots and with scant written explanation—than on the traditional merits docket with open argument and signed opinions
By the time the Supreme Court’s term ended last October, a major accounting milestone had already passed quietly—one that, to many legal watchers, feels less like procedure and more like power moving in the dark.
For the first time. the court decided more cases by secret ballot. with few signed opinions. than it did for cases argued in open court. Those rulings—part of what’s known as the court’s “shadow docket”—are designed to deliver decisions fast. They often come with limited briefings, expedited timetables, and sparse explanations. Justices infrequently explain how they voted or cite legal precedent in the way the public is used to from signed merits opinions.
The practical effect. critics say. is that the shadow docket can bulldoze through challenges that would normally take longer to reach the justices. This has empowered President Donald Trump at the same time as his administration has increased its use of executive authority. The court has repeatedly allowed policies championed by Trump that lower courts had blocked—sometimes with little to no explanation—according to the analysis.
Those emergency decisions have not stayed confined to courtroom procedure. They have thrown lower courts’ processes into turmoil and have at times directly contradicted longstanding legal precedent. The stakes have been concrete: the high court has used the shadow docket to limit federal courts from issuing nationwide injunctions. diminish Congress’ authority over federal agencies. and allow the detention of American citizens by immigration agents.
The new count emerged from a review of Supreme Court rulings covering the years under Chief Justice John Roberts. going back as far as online archives allow. The analysis found that when the last court term ended. justices had issued 63 orders on the shadow docket. compared with 56 orders on the traditional merits docket—where oral arguments are scheduled months in advance and the justices issue signed opinions.
Legal scholars and court watchers were stunned. They told the outlet that the finding appears to be the first time in modern history that so many consequential decisions were made in secret by the court’s nine members.
“The patterns show a court going out of its way to enable Trump. ” said Stephen Vladeck. a law professor at Georgetown University and a Supreme Court analyst. He said the findings reinforce the appearance that the justices are voting on their political preferences. “That’s the real blow to the court’s credibility,” he said.
Representatives from the Supreme Court did not respond to a detailed list of questions.
In response to the broader criticism. the White House said in a statement that President Trump has faced “a historically unprecedented number of injunctions by liberal lower court judges” and that those same judges “would rather push their own policy schemes and undermine the Administration’s lawful agenda.” The statement added: “President Trump will not stop implementing the America First initiatives on which he was elected.”.
To understand why the numbers matter, it helps to see how cases reach the Supreme Court. There are two main routes: one is to exhaust appeals in lower courts and petition for oral argument before the justices. who decide which cases to take. The other is to petition directly through the emergency docket—asking the court to freeze a lower-court ruling or a government policy while the case works its way through appeal.
Emergency applications have long outnumbered merits petitions, but most have been procedural requests or stays for capital cases. When those are stripped away, what remains is often labeled the shadow docket—matters that seek to skip the usual order of steps and get a quick ruling from the justices.
The shadow docket’s modern shape is tied to a pivotal moment in 2016. Experts point to the Supreme Court’s emergency stay against President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Papers obtained by The New York Times show that at the time. liberal justices urged Chief Justice Roberts not to decide the case on an emergency basis because it broke with longtime precedent. Conservative justices. according to those papers. argued that the plan would eventually be overturned anyway and that it would impose too much burden on the energy industry.
The pattern shifted again as the Trump administration took office. The analysis says the current Trump administration appeals to the emergency docket significantly more often than previous administrations, and the court has increasingly agreed to take quick action.
The Obama and George W. Bush administrations together filed just eight petitions in 16 years. The Trump administration filed 32 in 2025 alone, an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found.
Donald Ayer, a former deputy solicitor general and deputy attorney general who served under the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. said the court’s increased willingness to intervene on Trump’s behalf—along with other issues that favor conservatives and Trump allies—has upended American life. “On many subjects of real importance to our future, they’ve demolished what used to be the law,” he said.
The public confrontation with the shadow docket grew sharper in September 2021. The Supreme Court used it to issue a one-paragraph. unsigned opinion that further rolled back abortion rights established in the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. In that order. the court refused to block Texas’ Senate Bill 8. the “Heartbeat Act. ” which banned abortion after an embryo’s cardiac activity is detectable—typically at six weeks of pregnancy. before many people know they are pregnant.
Protests erupted nationwide, and the Senate held a hearing on the shadow docket.
Justice Elena Kagan later referenced the shadow docket by name in a dissent. She accused the majority of green-lighting a “patently unconstitutional law” with only a cursory review in less than 72 hours. “In all these ways. the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow docket decisionmaking — which every day becomes more unreasoned. inconsistent. and impossible to defend. ” Kagan wrote.
It was also unusual that an opinion was issued at all—and that four justices signed their names to it. On the shadow docket, justices typically do not have to make their votes known. In rare cases. votes can be revealed in terse indications that they grant or deny the application. or in more rarely published opinions. The analysis found that just 17% of votes cast had any sort of public record of a vote or opinion.
Responding to public criticism, Justice Samuel Alito argued the court isn’t responsible for the rise in shadow docket cases. “We do not file these emergency applications,” he said. “Parties file them.”
The debate has continued. During an April speech on the shadow docket at Yale Law School, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said: “We cannot expect the public to have faith in our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we consistently green-light harmful acts that do real damage.”
Until this past term, emergency applications fluctuated year to year without a clear upward trend. The process works like this: applications are first given to a single justice. who decides whether the case is worth referring to the full court. In recent years, justices have referred more of these appeals for full-court review and a vote.
Last term, when there were both more cases and more referrals to the full court, the appeals to the shadow docket overtook those to the merits docket, the analysis says.
The court’s interventions have been consequential enough to land in real lives—often on timelines that do not allow for the slow deliberation people expect from the nation’s highest tribunal.
On June 23, 2025, for example, after a lower court ruled that eight men being deported to South Sudan should have due process, the Supreme Court intervened after a request from the administration to stop that order. The men were deported. The majority did not issue an opinion justifying its ruling.
Three months later. the Supreme Court voted to allow immigration agents to stop people based on racial or ethnic characteristics while litigation against the practice continued. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a rare shadow docket opinion to justify the decision. saying that people who were in the country legally would be “free to go after the brief encounter.” Those rulings became known as “Kavanaugh stops.” ProPublica reported last year that it had found more than 170 citizens who had been stopped and detained by ICE agents. The more than 50 Americans held even after agents learned of their citizenship were almost all Latino.
In May. while an election in Louisiana was already underway. the justices allowed the state to immediately redraw its electoral map—removing one of the two majority-Black voting districts. Louisiana could then use that map for the 2026 midterms as part of a nationwide redistricting battle for control of the House of Representatives. tied to Trump’s call for Republican-led states to create more safe seats for themselves.
The analysis also found that Justice John Roberts has behaved differently than his critics expected. Roberts once signed on to Justice Kagan’s dissent assailing the shadow docket. Yet the review found that he has referred more substantive cases for a vote by the full court than any other justice—going from just one in the 2005 term. when he joined the court. to nearly half of all referrals in the last term.
One further difference between shadow docket and merits cases makes the public attention feel mismatched to the moment. After the court holds public argument, the final merits decisions are closely watched and extensively covered. The summer “decision season” has a predictable cadence that ends when justices go on summer recess. The shadow docket does not follow that rhythm. Increasingly, big decisions are made after the court’s final merits docket decision, when public attention has waned.
A group of Democrats led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., has sponsored legislation to make the shadow docket more transparent. Raskin told ProPublica the court’s legitimacy has fallen with every significant decision made without “real opinions or analysis.”
“Lower federal courts have been deciding against the Trump administration in an overwhelming majority of cases with weighty and well-reasoned opinions. ” Raskin said in a written statement. “Yet when things get to the twilight zone of the shadow docket. the Supreme Court is overturning 100-page opinions with a flippant sentence or two.” He added: “The result is a body that looks less like a Supreme Court and more like a Royal Court rubber stamping the madness and folly of the Trump Administration.”.
The debate over the shadow docket isn’t only about counts and secrecy. It’s about what the public sees—and what gets decided before anyone can mount a fuller argument.
The editorial thread running through all of these cases is hard to miss: the court’s emergency path is delivering results at speed, often without the kind of signed reasoning that would normally accompany decisions with sweeping consequences.
How the review was conducted also matters to the credibility of its numbers. To compare the number of cases on the shadow docket to the traditional merits docket. the outlet compared emergency applications listed on the court’s online docket search with counts of decisions compiled in Penn State’s Supreme Court Database (Version 2025 Release 01). For the merits docket, it counted only signed decisions in argued cases.
The analysis looked at Supreme Court terms from October 2003 to October 2025. where emergency applications are identified by the letter “A” in their docket number. Over that period. the outlet identified more than 27. 000 emergency applications. including thousands of requests that it said are not commonly understood to be part of the shadow docket.
Most excluded cases were handled by a single justice. each overseeing one or more federal circuits and empowered to refer filings to the wider court. When cases are referred to the full court, they become subject to a vote by the justices. The outlet’s method defined a substantive shadow docket application as any filing where the full court was asked to intervene in the traditional appeals process. such as staying a lower court’s order.
The outlet also addressed the risk that emergency applications denied by one justice could be appealed to another. A filer can appeal to another justice if their application is denied. The next justice to receive the application always refers it to the full court. The outlet said it did not include these renewed applications because it found the court has never granted one.
Capital punishment cases were treated differently. The court has labeled capital punishment cases only since the October 2017 term. To identify them before that. the outlet flagged applications for stays of execution and manually reviewed every case referred to the full court. For applications decided by a single justice. it used an AI model to flag possible capital cases by examining the parties on the application and the relief requested. The model flagged over 60 possible capital cases, which were manually reviewed. The outlet cautioned that some capital cases might still be included in the final tallies before the 2017 term.
Although rulings on the shadow docket are typically unsigned and do not include vote breakdowns. the outlet said it was able to identify how a justice voted in some cases. The analysis was based on either the opinions issued by the justices—most of which are dissenting opinions—or whether a justice indicated they would have granted or denied. If a decision included a statement not attached to either a grant or denial. the outlet said it did not record it as a vote.
For all of the technicalities, the human question remains: when the court chooses secrecy over explanation, the timeline leaves less room for public scrutiny, less space for lower courts to stabilize their own rulings, and less certainty for people caught in the immediate consequences.
The numbers from last term—63 shadow docket orders versus 56 merits docket orders—force that question into the open, even if the votes themselves stay mostly out of view.
Supreme Court shadow docket merits docket emergency applications secret ballot John Roberts Donald Trump injunctions immigration detention Texas Senate Bill 8 Heartbeat Act June 23 2025 South Sudan deportations Kavanaugh stops Louisiana redistricting Jamie Raskin transparency legislation Elena Kagan dissent Samuel Alito Ketanji Brown Jackson