In a public appearance, Jackson said the high court’s use of the emergency docket was “problematic” and called for more restraint from her colleagues when using it.
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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Thursday slammed the Supreme Court’s use of its “emergency docket,” suggesting the court has misused the process in allowing the Trump administration to move forward with a host of controversial policies while challenges play out in lower court.
The high court’s emergency docket has been criticized by a range of legal experts who say the justices can make consequential decisions while offering little or no explanation for their reasoning.
In emergency-docket cases, the Supreme Court typically does not hold oral arguments and the justices’ vote counts are not always clear. For those reasons, critics call it the “shadow docket.”
Typically, parties such as the Trump administration use the docket to ask the high court to temporarily freeze adverse rulings by lower courts.
To a packed house in an auditorium at the University of the District of Columbia, Jackson called the Supreme Court’s use of the emergency docket “problematic” and said the court was using the docket too frequently to issue decisions that she argued could cause harm to the general public.
“We cannot expect the public to have faith in our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we are consistently green-lighting harmful acts that do real damage to litigating plaintiffs,” Jackson said, asserting that the cases should go through the natural litigation process in lower court before the Supreme Court steps in.
As examples, Jackson cited the high court’s recent rulings that allowed the Trump administration to significantly diminish the Education Department, cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in government grants and allow immigration agents to consider race and linguistic abilities when making investigatory stops.
The junior-most justice, widely considered the most liberal on the high court, also noted that the court ruled against the Trump administration when it stopped President Donald Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago and, most recently, blocked the president’s sweeping mail-in ballot restrictions.
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Some observers argue that the court’s use of the emergency docket is necessary because litigation can take years to sort out and the Supreme Court must sometimes intervene. Justice Elena Kagan told members of Congress in July that the justices are doing a “better job” of providing more written explanations in their emergency opinions.
Jackson has frequently criticized the high court’s use of the emergency docket, particularly in her written dissents. In one opinion, she compared the court’s use of the emergency docket to “Calvinball jurisprudence,” referencing a game played in the “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip.
“Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules,” Jackson wrote in August 2025.
She has also lambasted the court’s use of the docket in public appearances, debating earlier this year with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh about how the court applies its emergency power. Kavanaugh had argued that the Supreme Court treated the Biden administration requests on the emergency docket similar to those of the Trump administration, which Jackson argued was not true.
On Thursday, Jackson called on her colleagues to practice more restraint in the court’s use of the docket and return to “first principles.” She highlighted the fact that the Supreme Court had historically not used the emergency docket the way it is being used now, and argued that the high court’s predecessors tried to avoid hot-button cases at such early stages.
Past Supreme Court justices, she said, “understood that very little good comes from taking an institution that is supposed to be operating outside of the political realm and routinely steering it into the fray.”
Jackson said the present court, by contrast, “has been noticeably less restrained, especially with respect to pending cases that involve controversial matters.”
