The emergency docket goes quiet – for now

On Tuesday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied a bid by an Ecuadorian national to stave off his extradition to that country to face sexual abuse charges. One day earlier, the full court – over a dissent by the three Democratic appointees – cleared the way for the Trump administration to substantially reduce the size of the Department of Education. Both of those actions on the court’s emergency docket, sometimes known as the “shadow docket,” were significant in their own right. But the court’s orders also resolved the major pending requests on the emergency docket for the court’s 2024-25 term. (Although the Supreme Court’s new term does not officially begin until the first Monday in October, the court begins to assign docket numbers bearing the new term’s year in July.)

This means that only three major cases are currently pending on the emergency docket, all for the 2025-26 term. And only one of those – a July 2 request to be able to remove three members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission appointed by then-President Joe Biden – came from the Trump administration. That’s a sharp drop from earlier this year, when (even counting the three nearly identical requests to partially block orders that barred the Trump administration from ending birthright citizenship as a single application) the Trump administration filed 18 requests for relief between late January, when President Donald Trump took office, and the end of June. Indeed, at several points in May, as many as six requests for relief from the Trump administration were pending before the court at any one time.

Is this only a temporary lull in the emergency docket? It’s hard to say, but it seems likely. On the one hand, virtually all of the requests for emergency relief between late January and late June stemmed from the many executive orders and actions that followed soon after Trump’s inauguration, which in turn could have led to a surge in such requests. On the other hand, the court did not always act as quickly on the Trump administration’s requests as the government would have liked. The justices took nearly six weeks, for example, before granting the Trump administration’s request to remove members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, which suggests that the sheer number of cases pending at any particular time can also be attributed to the justices, not just the Trump administration. In other words, the justices will act on their own timeframe.

But more broadly, more potential requests are looming on the horizon. Some of those would be coming to the justices for the first time – if, say, Trump were to actually fire Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve Board, as Trump has mused. But others could come to the court as part of the aftermath of earlier emergency appeals. For example, although the Supreme Court on July 8 allowed the Trump administration to implement plans to significantly reduce the federal workforce, the court did not weigh in on the legality of specific reductions in force (as pointed out by Sotomayor’s concurrence), so challenges to those RIFs could return to the court soon.

Similarly, although the court on June 27 ruled that federal judges do not have the power to implement universal injunctions, they left open the possibility that broad challenges to the president’s order ending birthright citizenship could move forward as a class action. In a proceeding that could come to the Supreme Court on the emergency docket, U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante recently certified a class in a challenge to that order and barred the Trump administration from enforcing it.

So how long will this lull last? Stay tuned.