Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized her conservative colleagues on the court for issuing emergency orders that advance Trump administration policies, saying she hoped her speech could serve as “a catalyst for change.”
Jackson made the comments during an April 13 guest lecture at Yale Law School, which published a video of the event on April 15.
Jackson, who was appointed by then-President Joe Biden in 2022, discussed the high court’s emergency docket, also known as the interim relief docket and, pejoratively, the shadow docket, which refers to applications that seek immediate action from the justices.
Such cases are handled on an expedited basis, with limited briefing and generally without oral arguments. Often, the orders that follow are unsigned and provide little or no reasoning, although sometimes justices will file concurring or dissenting opinions.
The issue in emergency appeals is often whether a policy being challenged in court should be allowed to take effect while litigation that could take years to complete plays out.
Lower courts have stifled President Donald Trump’s policy agenda by issuing orders blocking some aspects of it. The second Trump administration has increasingly turned to the Supreme Court for emergency relief, and that court has often granted it by lifting lower court orders that blocked controversial immigration policies, federal spending cuts, mass firings, or the president’s efforts to remove members of executive agencies.
Although the Supreme Court’s emergency orders are designed to be temporary, they have allowed Trump to move forward with key parts of his policy agenda.
Jackson has previously critiqued those emergency orders in dissenting opinions and in a joint appearance last month with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by Trump in 2018.
In the April 13 appearance, Jackson said that she had come “neither to praise the emergency docket, nor to bury it.”
Because it uses “truncated procedures” to produce “extremely consequential decisions,” she said it was important to return the emergency docket to its “traditional function within the overall appellate framework.”
The Supreme Court “fails to acknowledge the harms that follow” when the court “consistently and casually divests the lower courts of their equitable authority,” Jackson said.
Courts have equitable authority, meaning that they can order fair, nonmonetary remedies when standard legal remedies are deemed insufficient.
Applying these orders, which she called “scratch-paper musings,” to lower courts in other cases, distorts the legal process, the justice said.
Jackson also described orders on the emergency docket as “back-of-the-envelope, first-blush impressions of the merits of the legal issue.” Such orders don’t acknowledge that real people are involved, which makes them “seem oblivious and thus ring hollow,” she said.
The court’s emergency orders can come across as “utterly irrational,” the justice said.
The public cannot be expected to have faith in the judicial system if the Supreme Court consistently approves “harmful acts that do real damage to litigating plaintiffs” without issuing a decision that fully and fairly assesses the merits of the cases, she said.
Although the Supreme Court has often held that blocking a presidential policy is a harm that outweighs what those challenging a policy face, Jackson said the president isn’t being harmed “if what he wants to do is illegal.”
The court should be more selective when intervening early in the legal process, instead of “continually touching the third rail of every divisive policy issue in American life,” she said.
On March 9, Jackson and Kavanaugh clashed over the emergency docket at a public event in the nation’s capital.
The Supreme Court is doing a disservice to both the court and the country by siding so often with the Trump administration in emergency rulings, Jackson said.
“The administration is making new policy … and then insisting the new policy take effect immediately, before the challenge is decided,” the justice said.
Jackson said the Supreme Court is “creating a kind of warped” legal process by intervening at an early stage of a case and basically predicting the outcome before the arguments are developed fully.
Kavanaugh said the Supreme Court is only doing its job by addressing the emergency applications filed.
He said some critics of recent orders did not object when the justices allowed Biden administration policies that were being challenged to take effect even as cases about them were pending in lower courts.
Kavanaugh said the issues for the justices are often complicated, and the cases are close.
“None of us enjoys this,” he said.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared April 16, 2026, in The Epoch Times.
Photo: Official Photograph of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson taken by Supreme Court Photographer Fred Schilling, 2022.