Making Sense of the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket

The rightward shift of the Supreme Court under John Roberts has been masked by its use of a shadow docket for granting emergency relief. Instead of issuing lengthy opinions after rigorous debate, the Court has increasingly relied on judgments that are short, unsigned, and unexplained. We’ll explore the use of the shadow docket to disguise political objectives of the justices in such areas as voting rights, same-sex marriage, and abortion. 

Mark Davis served as an assistant attorney general in Maryland representing state agencies, including the State Board of Elections. His presentations for Renesan have covered jazz, 20^th-century European and American history, and, most recently, appeasement of dictators in the late thirties.