About a decade ago, William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago, was drafting a law review article with a working title so bland and uninviting that it would be lucky to achieve obscurity. He was going to call it “Paying Attention to the Orders List.”
He had served as a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and he knew his way around the Supreme Court’s docket. And he had been noticing that the court was increasingly issuing terse orders deciding consequential matters with a notable lack of transparency.
A colleague, Justin Driver, now a law professor at Yale, read the draft and told Professor Baude that his title was terrible. Professor Driver had a sexier suggestion: “The Supreme Court’s Secret Docket.”
That was not quite right, Professor Baude recalled the other day. But he appreciated the nudge, and he went with “The Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket.”
Ten years later, Supreme Court justices are still debating whether “shadow docket” is a fair label for the unsigned orders that the court issues, often without reasoning, in quickly responding to applications for emergency relief, usually without the benefit of full briefing, oral arguments or in-person discussions.
Whatever you call it, this new docket has lately become a central feature of the court’s work, competing with the more familiar and far more considered and deliberate merits docket, in which the justices consider two rounds of briefs, hear arguments and produce long and careful opinions.
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The post The Supreme Court’s Fast Track Needs a Name, and the Justices Are Split appeared first on New York Times.
