Stop forcing Supreme Court justices to endure the indignity of writing things down

The beauty of the shadow docket was its complete disregard for narrative arc. In a traditional case, there are months of oral arguments, amicus briefs, and public speculation. It’s practically a television season. But the emergency docket was a jump scare. You would go to sleep secure in the knowledge that your local election districts were contiguous, and you would wake up to find they had been redrawn into the shape of a fractal by a 5-4 vote that contained fewer words than a fast-food receipt.

Now, progressive activists and disgruntled legal scholars are demanding that the highest court in the land write 50-page essays justifying every single fundamental alteration to the fabric of American life. Do these people have any idea how exhausting it is to formulate a cohesive legal theory when you already know the conclusion you want to reach?

Drafting a majority opinion requires hiring clerks, searching for seventeenth-century witch-trial precedents that vaguely align with your personal grievances, and properly formatting the footnotes. It is a grueling, thankless administrative burden. When a justice is forced to explain why a multinational polluter is immune from oversight, they are being dragged away from their true passions: taking undisclosed luxury fishing trips and speaking at closed-door Federalist Society galas.

Chief Justice John Roberts has reportedly been wringing his hands over the "legitimacy" of the institution, operating under the quaint delusion that the American public will respect the Court more if it shows its math. He seems to believe that a beautifully written 5-4 decision stripping federal agencies of their regulatory power will be greeted with applause, so long as it properly cites a 19th-century maritime treaty. This is the kind of naive, ivory-tower thinking that makes me worry about the man's grasp on reality.

Consider the optics. When the Court explains itself, it invites scrutiny. A written opinion is just a target painted on the back of a perfectly good partisan objective. When Justice Samuel Alito is forced to write down his feelings about the modern administrative state, people read them, and then they get upset. The messaging gets completely derailed by the base, who suddenly feel entitled to have an opinion on the matter.

By contrast, a shadow docket ruling is a ghost. It arrives in the dead of night, reorganizes the civil rights of thirty million people, and vanishes before the Sunday shows can even book a constitutional scholar to complain about it. You cannot argue with a one-paragraph PDF that has no author. You can only obey it.

A source close to leadership on Capitol Hill recently confided in me that the conservative caucus is quietly panicking about this new era of judicial chattiness. They spent decades engineering a judicial supermajority specifically so they wouldn't have to explain themselves to the electorate anymore.

Furthermore, we must think of the stakeholders. There are men—good, hardworking billionaires—who have spent vast fortunes flying these justices to remote Alaskan lodges, buying their mothers' houses, and paying their spouses for vague consulting services. When you purchase a bespoke judicial intervention, you do not want it bogged down in 80 pages of historical pontification. You want the injunction delivered swiftly, quietly, and without a paper trail.

The demand for public hearings and signed opinions is nothing more than a populist temper tantrum. The founders understood that true power does not need to justify itself. Alexander Hamilton did not envision a judiciary that had to constantly apologize to the lower classes for taking away their bodily autonomy or their clean drinking water.

It is time to let the justices log off. We do not need a twenty-page syllabus on why a state legislature should be allowed to disenfranchise a specific zip code. If we truly respect the rule of law, we will stop forcing our most powerful citizens to endure the indignity of having to justify it.