Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Says Supreme Court's Emergency Docket Gives One Side a 'Fast Pass'

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used a Thursday, September 24 speech at the University of the District of Columbia School of Law to deliver her most detailed public critique yet of how her colleagues handle the court's emergency docket, according to Courthouse News Service, USA Today, and The Hill.

Jackson never named the Trump administration directly. She didn't have to.

"As one of my colleagues recently suggested in an opinion, some frequent emergency docket filers have the court on speed dial," Jackson said, according to USA Today. That's a reference to Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent last year in a dispute over deporting migrants to South Sudan.

"Why is it that one party should get a fast pass to the Supreme Court of the United States, when so many other parties are queued up, waiting patiently for the court's attention?" Jackson asked, according to The Hill. "If we're not careful, the emergency docket can and will become an end run around the standard review process, a special avenue that certain privileged litigants can use selectively."

What the Numbers Show

The emergency docket, also called the shadow docket, lets parties ask the Supreme Court to pause a lower court ruling fast, sometimes in days, without full briefing or oral argument. The Trump administration has filed 40 emergency applications since the start of the president's second term, The Hill reported. It has won about 80% of those appeals, according to research cited by Politico.

Those wins cleared the way for mass firings of federal employees, the termination of Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants, and construction of Trump's $400 million White House ballroom, according to The Daily Beast and Suara Garut.

Jackson said the court used to operate differently. "It was only in exigent circumstances, actual emergencies, that the justices felt the need to intervene in pending cases," she said, per USA Today. She pointed to the late Justice Antonin Scalia as someone who routinely declined to weigh in on stay requests, according to Courthouse News Service.

The Case for the Defense

Jackson's critique deserves a fair hearing, but it isn't the whole picture. Since Trump took office in January 2025, district court judges have issued a wave of nationwide injunctions attempting to freeze administration policy while litigation plays out. The administration's argument, echoed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in Fox News coverage defending Trump's criticism of the court, is that a single district judge shouldn't get to permanently block presidential authority while a case crawls through years of appeals. Seeking emergency relief from the Supreme Court, in that view, is simply how a president protects his own constitutional authority from being neutralized by forum-shopped lawsuits.

The emergency docket hasn't been a rubber stamp when the merits are finally decided. USA Today reported that when Trump's tariff powers and his attempt to rewrite birthright citizenship rules reached the court for a full, final ruling, the justices shut both down. The interim wins on the emergency docket and the final losses on the merits are two different things, and the court's own record shows it isn't simply protecting Trump on every question.

Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, acknowledged the concerns about the emergency docket during a July congressional hearing but pushed back on the idea the court is being opaque, saying the justices have elaborated on their reasoning when appropriate, according to The Washington Sun.

A Pattern, Not a One-Off

This wasn't Jackson's first swing at the issue. In April, she told a Yale Law School audience that in the late 1990s the emergency docket was almost exclusively used for death row cases, not sweeping policy fights, according to The Daily Beast. In July, speaking in Alaska, she called it "a net negative for the court to be evaluating issues on the emergency docket," per The Washington Sun. And in a prior written opinion over a blocked $783 million in federal health research grants, Jackson wrote that the court's approach amounts to "Calvinball jurisprudence," a made-up game with one real rule: "this Administration always wins," as reported by USA Today.

One detail largely absent from most coverage but flagged by The Daily Beast: the same night Jackson delivered her critique, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett attended a White House state dinner hosted by Trump for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

A note on the record: a report from Suara Garut dated Jackson's remarks to Friday, September 25. USA Today and Courthouse News Service place the speech on Thursday, September 24, the day before.

Jackson didn't propose eliminating the emergency docket. She wants a consistent, disclosed standard, one where litigants must show real-world harm before getting fast-tracked relief, and where the court explains its reasoning rather than issuing unsigned orders. Whether Roberts, Kavanaugh, Barrett, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas or Neil Gorsuch take up that suggestion is an open question. Nothing in the court's public schedule indicates a change in how emergency applications will be handled going forward.