The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic

University of Texas law professor Vladeck debuts with an expert study of how the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has increasingly used “obscure procedural orders to shift American jurisprudence definitively to the right.” Unlike the “merits docket,” where justices issue lengthy, signed opinions months after hearing oral arguments, rulings handed down on the “shadow docket” are unsigned, unexplained, and often released in the middle of the night. Though the majority ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization officially overturned Roe v. Wade, Vladeck points out that an unsigned order issued nearly 10 months prior effectively did the same thing—when the court refused to block a Texas law banning abortions after six weeks. Since 2017, shadow docket rulings have also kept restrictive voting laws in place, blocked Covid-19 vaccine mandates, and perhaps even altered control of the current Congress, by staying a series of lower-court decisions in redistricting cases, even though those decisions were consistent with existing precedent. Vladeck analyzes the most consequential of these shadow docket orders, revealing how they “run roughshod over long-settled understandings of both the formal and practical limits of the Court’s authority,” and calls for congressional action to limit such rulings. This insightful and accessible account raises an important alarm. (May)