WASHINGTON — Supreme CourtJustice Ketanji Brown Jackson has delivered a sustained attack on her conservative colleagues’ use of emergency orders to benefit the Trump administration, calling the orders “scratch-paper musings” that can “seem oblivious and thus ring hollow.”
The court’s newest justice, Jackson delivered a lengthy assessment of roughly two dozen court orders issued last year that allowed President Donald Trump to put in place controversial policies on immigration, steep federal funding cuts and other topics, after lower courts found they were likely illegal.
While designed to be short-term, those orders have largely allowed Trump to move ahead – for now – with key parts of his sweeping agenda.
Jackson spoke for nearly an hour on Monday at Yale Law School, which posted a video of the event on Wednesday.
Last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor similarly talked about emergency orders in an event Tuesday at the University of Alabama that also took issue with the conservatives’ approach.
Jackson has previously criticized the emergency orders both in dissenting opinions and in an unusual appearance with Justice Brett Kavanaugh last month. But her talk at Yale, addressing the public rather than the other eight justices, was notable.
She referred to orders, which often are issued with little or no explanation as “back-of-the-envelope, first-blush impressions of the merits of the legal issue.”
Worse still, she said, was that the court then insists that “those scratch-paper musings” be applied by lower courts in other cases.
The orders suffer from an additional problem, she said, a failure to acknowledge that real people are involved, making them “seem oblivious and thus ring hollow.”
She also pushed back on the court’s assessment that preventing the president from putting his policy in place also is a harm that often outweighs what the challengers to a policy might face.
“The president of the United States, though he may be harmed in an abstract way, he certainly isn’t harmed if what he wants to do is illegal,” Jackson said during a question-and-answer session with law school dean Cristina Rodriguez.
The court used to be reluctant to step into cases early in the legal process, she said. “There is value in avoiding having the court continually touching the third rail of every divisive policy issue in American life,” Jackson said.
While she said she couldn’t explain the change, “in recent years, the Supreme Court has taken a decidedly different approach to addressing emergency stay applications. It has been noticeably less restrained, especially with respect to pending cases that involve controversial matters.”
Jackson, often joined by Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan, has frequently dissented.
There have been conversations about emergency orders among the justices, Jackson said, but she decided to speak publicly with the goal of being “a catalyst for change.”
Also on Wednesday, Sotomayor issued a rare public apology to another justice, Kavanaugh, for what she termed “hurtful comments” she made last week during an appearance at the University of Kansas law school.
Referencing an opinion Kavanaugh wrote in an immigration case where the court granted an emergency order sought by the administration, Sotomayor said her colleague “probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.” Her remarks were reported by Bloomberg Law.
