During its term that ended last October, the Supreme Court took an important step that went unnoticed: for the first time, it ruled on more cases by secret ballot, and with few signed opinions, than in cases argued in open court.
These decisions, which constitute the court’s “shadow docket”, provide an expedited means of obtaining a decision from the highest court. They rarely include arguments, have limited briefings and have expedited timetables, and judges rarely provide explanations for how they voted or cite legal precedent.
The Supreme Court’s growing willingness to circumvent its usual process has empowered President Donald Trump, just as the administration has increased its use of executive power. The court has repeatedly green-lighted its policies that lower courts had blocked — and done so with little or no explanation.
These emergency rulings upended lower court processes and sometimes directly contradicted long-standing legal precedent. The results were consequential: the high court used this process to prevent federal courts from issuing nationwide injunctions and diminished Congress’s authority over federal agencies, and it allowed detention of U.S. citizens by immigration officials.
ProPublica analyzed more than two decades of Supreme Court decisions, spanning every year under Chief Justice John Roberts and going back as far as the online archive allow. We found that at the end of the court’s last term, the justices had issued 63 orders on the shadow docket, compared to 56 orders on the more traditional substantive docket — where the court hears oral arguments scheduled months in advance and the justices issue signed opinions.
Legal scholars and court observers were shocked by our discovery. They told ProPublica that it was probably the first time in modern history that so many important decisions were made in secret by its nine members.
“These trends show that a court is doing everything it can to enable Trump,” said Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and Supreme Court analyst. He said our findings reinforce the impression that judges are voting on their policy preferences.
“This is the real blow to the credibility of the Court,” he said.
Supreme Court officials did not respond to a detailed list of questions.
In a statement, a White House spokesperson wrote: “President Trump faced an unprecedented number of injunctions from liberal lower court judges, the same judges who preferred to advance their own policy agendas and undermine the administration’s legal agenda. President Trump will not stop implementing the America First initiatives he was elected to enact.”
For the first time in two decades, decisions on the Supreme Court’s shadow case outnumber those on the merits
There are two ways to obtain a decision from the Supreme Court. The first is to exhaust your appeals in the lower courts and apply to argue your case in the High Court. Judges decide whether to take on the case, and if they do, lawyers argue their case before them. The other is to petition directly to the justices via the emergency docket – to freeze a lower court ruling or government policy while the case is on appeal.
Appeals on the emergency docket have long outpaced those on the merits, but most are procedural requests or requests for stays of execution for capital offenses. When these are removed, what remains is known as shadow dockets – cases that seek to circumvent the usual order of things and demand a quick decision from court judges.
The modern shadow case originated in 2016 when the Supreme Court issued an emergency stay against President Barack Obama’s clean energy plan, experts say. Papers obtained by the New York Times show that liberal justices at the time urged Roberts not to decide the case urgently because it broke with long-standing precedent. Conservative justices, meanwhile, argued forcefully that the president’s plan would eventually be overturned by the court anyway and would impose too heavy a burden on the energy sector.
Driven by his many losses In the lower courts, the current Trump administration appeals to urgency much more often than previous administrations, and the court is increasingly willing to respond quickly to its appeals.
The Obama and George W. Bush administrations together filed only eight petitions in 16 years. The Trump administration has filed 32 in 2025 alone, according to an analysis by Brennan Center for Justice found.
The Roberts court’s increased willingness to intervene on Trump’s behalf — as well as in other issues that favor conservatives and Trump allies — has upended American life, said Donald Ayer, a former deputy solicitor general and deputy attorney general who served during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.
“On many issues of real importance to our future, they have demolished what was once the law,” he said.
Public scrutiny of the parallel docket intensified in September 2021 after the Supreme Court used it to issue a one-paragraph opinion, unsigned which further reduced the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade from 1973. decision. In that order, the court refused to block Texas Senate Bill 8, the “Heartbeat Act,” which banned abortion once an embryo’s heart activity is detectable, typically at six weeks of pregnancy and before many people know they are pregnant. Protests broke out across the country and the Senate held a hearing on the shadow docket.
In an unusual public acknowledgment, Justice Elena Kagan referred to the shadow docket by name in her scathing dissent, accusing the majority of green-lighting a “blatantly unconstitutional law” with only cursory review in less than 72 hours.
“In all of these ways, the majority’s decision is emblematic of too many of this Court’s phantom decisions – which become more unreasonable, inconsistent, and impossible to defend with each day,” Kagan wrote.
That an opinion was even issued and four of the judges signed their names to it was rare. On the shadow role, judges are not required to make their vote known. In rare cases, their votes are revealed as terse indications that they accept or reject the request, or even more rarely, as an opinion. We found that only 17% of votes cast had a public record of a vote or opinion.
Responding to public criticism, Justice Samuel Alito argued that the court was not responsible for the increase in phantom cases. “We do not file these requests urgently” he said. “The parties file them.”
The debate continued. “We cannot expect the public to have confidence in our justice system if, without clear explanation, we routinely green-light harmful acts that cause real harm,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said in an April speech at Yale Law School.
Until the last Supreme Court term, emergency requests fluctuated from year to year but showed no clear upward trend. Motions are first submitted to a single judge, who decides whether the case merits referral to the full court. In recent years, the justices have returned more such appeals for consideration and a vote by the full court.
Over the past season, as there were both more cases and more referrals to the full court, appeals to the shadow docket ultimately took precedence over those to the merits docket.
Emergency requests submitted to a full court vote have increased sharply
The total number of applications has varied over the past two decades, with a sharp increase during President Donald Trump’s final term.
Business was substantial. On June 23, 2025, after a lower court ruled that eight men deported to South Sudan should receive due process, the Supreme Court intervened after a request from the administration to overturn that decision. The men were deported. The majority did not issue an opinion justifying its decision.
Three months later, the Supreme Court voted to allow immigration officials to arrest people based on racial or ethnic characteristics while the ongoing case against him continued. To justify the decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a rare shadow opinion that said people who were in the country legally would be “free to leave after the brief encounter.” These became known as the “Kavanaugh Stops”. Last year, ProPublica found more than 170 citizens arrested and detained by ICE agents. The more than 50 Americans detained even after agents learned of their citizenship were almost all Latino.
And in May, with an election already underway in Louisiana, judges allowed the state to immediately redraw its electoral map, removing one of two majority-black voting districts. Louisiana can now use that map for the 2026 midterm elections as part of a nationwide redistricting battle for control of the House of Representatives — an effort sparked by Trump’s call for Republican-led states to create safer seats for themselves.
Roberts once signed up for a Kagan dissent who attacked the shadow file. But our analysis found that he has submitted more substantive cases for a vote by the full Court than any other justice, going from just one during his 2005 term when he joined the Court to nearly half of all referrals during the last term.
There is an additional difference between the shadow file and the substantive file. After the court holds public hearings, the judges’ final decisions on the merits are closely monitored and widely covered by the press. The summer “decision season,” when the final and most important decisions are made, has a predictable cadence that ends when the justices go on summer vacation. This is not the case with the ghost folder. Increasingly, judges are making major decisions after making their final decision on the merits, as public attention has waned.
A group of Democrats led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, sponsored legislation to make the shadow folder more transparent.
Raskin told ProPublica that the court’s legitimacy has plummeted with every major decision made without “real opinions or analysis”.
“Lower federal courts have ruled against the Trump administration in an overwhelming majority of cases, with serious and well-reasoned opinions,” Raskin said in a written statement. “Yet when things reach the twilight zone of the shadow docket, the Supreme Court overturns 100-page opinions with one or two flippant sentences.” He added: “The result is a body that looks less like a Supreme Court and more like a Royal Court approving the folly and insanity of the Trump administration. »
“The jurisprudence of the Roberts Court today is as murky as the green algae water in the Reflecting Pool.”
How we reported this story
To compare the number of cases on the Supreme Court’s shadow docket to the traditional substantive docket, we compared emergency requests listed on the Court’s docket. online file search with decision tallies compiled in Penn State’s Supreme Court Database (Version 2025 Release 01). For the merits record, we counted only signed decisions in argued cases, the typical format for these decisions.
The court’s online docket dates back to the year 2000, but our analysis covers Supreme Court terms from October 2003 to October 2025, where emergency requests are easily identified by the letter “A” in their docket number.
We have identified more than 27,000 emergency requests during this period, including thousands of requests that are not typically considered part of the parallel role. Most appeals to the emergency docket concern the type of requests that were traditionally handled there: procedural requests, such as extensions of the filing deadline, and requests for stays of execution for capital offenses. The rest is the subject of our reports.
Substantive Shadow File Cases are an SMA ll Fraction of all Emergency Requests
We defined a substantive application on the shadow docket as any filing in which the full court was asked to intervene in the traditional appellate process, such as staying a lower court order.
Most of the cases we excluded are decided by a single judge, each of whom oversees one or more federal circuits and has the power to refer cases to the larger court. When cases are sent to the full court, they are voted on by the justices. We called on several experts for our approach, all of whom found it relevant.
An applicant can appeal to another judge if his or her request is denied. The next judge to receive the request always sends it back to the full court. We did not include these renewed requests because our analysis revealed that the court never granted one.
The court has only qualified the cases as capital punishment since the October 2017 term. To identify them before, we flagged the requests for stay of execution. We then manually reviewed each case referred to the full court. For applications adjudicated by a single judge, we used an AI model to flag potential capital cases by reviewing the parties on the application and the relief requested. The model identified more than 60 possible capital punishment cases, and these were reviewed manually. Despite our efforts, some capital cases may still be included in our final tally ahead of the 2017 term.
Although decisions on the shadow docket are generally unsigned and do not include voting details, we were able to identify how a judge voted in some cases. The analysis is based either on opinions issued by the justices, most of which are dissenting opinions, or on whether the judge indicated he would have granted or denied the request. In some decisions, judges issued a statement that was linked to neither an authorization nor a refusal. We did not record them as votes.