Supreme Court summarily closes the courthouse doors again

Civil Rights and Wrongs is a recurring series by Daniel Harawa covering criminal justice and civil rights cases before the court.

I have written before about the Supreme Court’s troubling habit of summarily closing the courthouse doors on those with the least power in our legal system. Just last month, I wrote about Klein v. Martin and Clark v. Sweeney, two cases in which the court summarily reversed (that is, reversed a lower court decision without full briefing or oral argument) grants of relief to prisoners. I explained how the back-to-back summary reversals risked sending a chilling message to lower courts about the costs of taking prisoners’ constitutional claims seriously. I argued then that a pattern was emerging that deserved attention.

Zorn v. Linton, decided last month, seems to confirm that pattern, albeit in a different context.

Shela Linton was one of roughly 200 people who staged a sit-in at the Vermont state capitol on the day of the governor’s inauguration, demonstrating for universal healthcare. When the capitol closed, police began ushering out the protesters one by one. Linton refused to leave, so Sergeant Jacob Zorn decided to use a “pain compliance technique” called a “rear wristlock” to secure her exit. Specifically, Zorn grabbed Linton’s arm, wrenched it behind her back, and snapped her wrist until she screamed and rose to her feet. Linton left the Vermont capitol with “permanent damage to her left wrist and shoulder,” and has since “been ‘diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety.’”

Linton filed a civil rights suit arguing that Zorn violated her Fourth Amendment right against excessive force. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit held that Linton’s case should go to a jury so that her peers could decide whether Zorn violated her constitutional rights. But the Supreme Court summarily reversed, holding that Zorn was entitled to qualified immunity, since (according to the majority) the officer’s conduct had not “violate[d] clearly established law.”

What makes Zorn notable is not necessarily the qualified immunity holding itself. To be sure, the court’s expansive reading of that doctrine to protect police officers is well-documented and long-criticized. But the procedure by which the court granted immunity to Zorn – through summary reversal – reveals a troubling revival that seems a piece of a larger puzzle.

Summary reversals in qualified immunity cases were once a defining feature of the early Roberts court’s “shadow docket.” But the court’s summary-reversal practice had largely disappeared in recent years. It now seems that trend is reversing. As law professor Steve Vladeck notes, as of last week, we were less than halfway through the 2025-26 term, and the Supreme Court had already issued five of them.

That disposition (in both senses) is what connects Zorn to the habeas summary reversals in Klein and Sweeney that I wrote about before. The through-line is not the legal issues in dispute. It is the identity of the people that the court is willing to summarily turn away. In each case, someone with comparatively little power came to federal court, claiming that the government had constitutionally wronged them. That person won below, only to be thwarted by the Supreme Court, and quickly, without the full engagement afforded to the cases that make it to the merits docket.

The choice of procedure matters. Summary reversals are supposed to be reserved for obvious mistakes. When deployed properly, they are efficient. But when used repeatedly in one direction, against one class of litigants, they become something else: a steady drumbeat of summary reversals in favor of government defendants tells courts which claims, and which claimants, the court considers worth serious engagement. And that signal need not be explicit to be effective. Over time, those courts learn which side of the case is safer to be on.

In qualified immunity cases specifically, the doctrine already requires plaintiffs to identify “clearly established” law with a high degree of specificity. When the court steps in to reverse denials of immunity without full briefing, it reinforces the perception that the best course is to grant immunity to law enforcement at the outset. The same dynamic operates in habeas. There, too, the court’s recent summary reversals signal that vindicating an incarcerated person’s constitutional rights is risky. The cumulative effect across both doctrines is to narrow the space in which federal courts feel comfortable adjudicating constitutional claims on the merits at all.

And, as noted above, that trend portends far-reaching consequences. It can meaningfully reshape who realistically has access to constitutional remedies in the first place. When summary reversal becomes, or even appears to become, a one-way ratchet, the court’s procedural choices risk converting doctrines like qualified immunity and habeas deference from limits on redressability into insurmountable barriers – which is saying something, given how much of a barrier those doctrines already are.

If the court continues its pattern, those who most depend on federal courts to vindicate their rights will thus be increasingly less likely to find them receptive.