Supreme Court leak shakes institution's secrecy [View all]

Source: The Hill

04/22/26 8:00 AM ET


A major leak at the Supreme Court is shedding new light on its secretive practices — and shredding trust. Internal memos between the justices in 2016 published by The New York Times have created a firestorm around an institution that takes extraordinary measures to keep its contemplations confidential. The memos give insight into the court’s deliberations that led it to block then-President Obama’s Clean Power Plan — and to reimagine how its emergency docket functions.

Called the “shadow docket” by skeptics of the furtive practice, it has since then been used to hand President Trump roughly two dozen victories since his return to the White House. The decisions followed little briefing and no oral arguments, prompting fury from even some of the court’s own justices.

But even the law professor credited with coining the “shadow docket” term says the biggest scandal is the leak itself. “Supreme Court leaks like these — including copies of confidential work product — are becoming more common. In my view, this is a bad thing. It will damage the institutional culture of the Court and do little good,” wrote University of Chicago professor William Baude. It’s not an isolated incident. The memos surfaced as the four-year mark approaches of the seismic leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning abortion protections.

Together, the leaks are shaking confidence in the court’s historic privacy and prompting calls for a reckoning. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) called the leaks a “coordinated attack” by the left. “The point of it is to destroy the independence of the Supreme Court, to browbeat that court into doing what the left in this country wants,” Hawley said. The senator himself once clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, the focus of the recent leak, several years before he wrote the Clean Power Plan memos.

Read more: https://thehill.com/newsletters/the-gavel/5842678-supreme-court-shadow-docket-leak/