The Shadow Docket

"The Supreme Court has always had the authority to issue emergency rulings--halting an execution or preventing a law from going into effect until lower courts could rule on its constitutionality--but until recently, it did so only in exceptional circumstances and issued only narrow rulings. Yet in the past decade, the court has expanded its use of the behind-the-scenes 'shadow docket' dramatically, handing down major decisions that impact millions of Americans without oral argument or signed opinions, and often without any legal reasoning at all. ... Vladeck offers a comprehensive analysis of the shadow docket, tracing its emergence in the 1970s in the wake of major court decisions on the death penalty and its recent embrace by a conservative-leaning court that has expanded it to set policy on everything from election law to abortion to immigration. ... [The book] exposes a disturbing institutional crisis that threatens the foundations of our democracy, and calls for sweeping reform"--