The Shadow Docket
How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic
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4.5 • 16 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An instant New York Times bestseller: An acclaimed legal scholar’s “important” (New York Times) and “fascinating” (Economist) exposé of how the Supreme Court uses unsigned and unexplained orders to change the law behind closed doors.
The Supreme Court has always had the authority to issue emergency rulings in exceptional circumstances. But since 2017, the Court has dramatically expanded its use of the behind-the-scenes “shadow docket,” regularly making decisions that affect millions of Americans without public hearings and without explanation, through cryptic late-night rulings that leave lawyers—and citizens—scrambling.
The Court’s conservative majority has used the shadow docket to green-light restrictive voting laws and bans on abortion, and to curtail immigration and COVID vaccine mandates. But Americans of all political stripes should be worried about what the shadow docket portends for the rule of law, argues Supreme Court expert Stephen Vladeck. In this rigorous yet accessible book, he issues an urgent call to bring the Court back into the light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Takes an attorney to fully appreciate
The book was a real eye-opener regarding the many ways the Supreme Court has been destroying its own credibility. However in order to follow the author’s examples, it requires the reader to know the details of old cases that he references only by their names (e.g. Jones v Smith). Readers without exposure to those cases (including me) could easily miss the intended point.