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

“From abortion to affirmative action, gun control to greenhouse gas emissions, and redistricting to religious liberty, the Supreme Court has come to play a central role in virtually every major contemporary public policy debate. And in the last six years, in particular, the Court’s Republican majority has shaped those debates through a growing series of unsigned and unexplained orders—taking more and more advantage of what one conservative scholar in 2015 dubbed “the shadow docket,” the procedural case-management orders that comprise 99% of the Supreme Court’s overall output. But as Professor Stephen Vladeck demonstrates in his new book, the shadow docket is not just a source of problematic behavior by the current justices; it’s central to how the Supreme Court has been given—and has taken—so much power from the political branches over the past century, in marked contrast to the more modest (and more closely regulated) Court contemplated by the Constitution’s drafters.”