Dr. Taraleigh Davis is an Assistant Professor of Public Law and American Politics at Bradley University. She studies U.S. Supreme Court decision-making with a focus on emergency applications and their impact on policy and public opinion.
The New York Times is correct that the court’s ruling – to halt such a pivotal executive action on its emergency docket – was something new. But the emergency docket was long in effect – and the nature of the court’s deliberations on it were hardly unprecedented.
By now, readers of SCOTUSblog are quite familiar with the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, where parties come to the court seeking emergency orders, oftentimes without full briefing and oral argument. Much of the discourse surrounding this docket centers on its opacity.
For years, scholars and commentators have tracked the Supreme Court’s merits docket through detailed statistical analyses. SCOTUSblog’s Stat Pack has become an essential resource for understanding how the justices decide cases after full briefing and oral argument.
If you’re requesting emergency relief from the Supreme Court, how long should you expect to wait for a decision? In other words, does the court really treat emergency applications as emergencies? The answer, it turns out, depends on what kind of emergency you have.
By now, you’ve probably heard a great deal about the Supreme Court’s interim relief docket, also known as the emergency or “shadow” docket – which, although it technically refers to all cases that are not briefed and argued on the merits, is commonly used to describe the cases in which a party comes to the court for an order on an emergency basis without full briefing and oral argument.