Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket with Stephen Vladeck
Episode Date: July 21, 2025With approval ratings of The Supreme Court at a historic low, what can Congress and the average American citizen do to hold the court accountable, and foster transparency? Sharon welcomes law professo...r Stephen Vladeck to nerd out about all things Supreme Court. Stephen dives into the elusive behind-the-scenes “shadow docket,” and how 99% of what the court does is in the shadows – without public hearings, and without explanation. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hey friends, welcome.
Delighted to have you with me today.
The Supreme Court term has ended and
won't begin again until October, and that is why this is the perfect time to talk about
something that the court has been making increasing use of, known as the Shadow Docket.
My guest is Georgetown Law Professor Steve Vladeck, and I can't wait for you to hear this conversation. So
let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.
Of course, I love the Supreme Court, and I read your book with interest, and it is a book about
the Supreme Court's shadow dockets. So much to talk about, so much to get into. I would love for you to
start by giving people just a little bit of your professional background so they
have a basis for understanding how you even came to write a book about the
shadow docket and then we'll get into it. So I'm, as I say, a law professor at the
University of Texas in Austin, Hookum. I've been teaching for 17 years and my real areas of expertise are nerdy
questions of federal legal procedure and sort of the structure of the federal court system.
And of course, the Supreme Court figures prominently in all of that. And I've been lucky,
as I've been teaching and writing about the Supreme Court, I've also had a couple of opportunities to
practice before the Supreme Court. But Sharon, for me, my interest in the Supreme Court has always been
sort of drawn to the more technical side of what the court does, partly because
I'm a proceduralist at heart, like I'm interested in how systems work and not
just the bottom lines that they produce.
And partly because I think there's actually a lot of stuff buried in the
procedure that
actually is really important.
And it's really a big part of what impelled me to write this book was to try to actually
bring to folks who care about the Supreme Court, who are interested in the Supreme Court,
but maybe who are not the nerds about the Supreme Court that I am, more understanding
of how it came to be that the Supreme Court plays such this
dominant role in so many facets of our contemporary public policy debates.
Well, you know what we call people like you, Steve.
People in this community, we call ourselves governors.
So you can take that and run with it, Steve.
I of course am very interested in the Supreme Court's influence on public life.
But as you mentioned, in order to understand the scope of their impact, you have to understand
the shadow docket.
So first of all, what is the shadow docket?
For somebody who hasn't read the book yet, what actually is it?
So the term is this really descriptive shorthand that Chicago law professor named
Will Bode coined in 2015, really to encompass everything that the Supreme Court does.
All the rulings the Supreme Court hands down, other than the 60 or so big, long decisions we get every May and June in cases that have received the full nine yards of process,
in cases in which there was oral argument, multiple rounds of briefing.
That's the merits docket. And the shadow docket is basically everything else.
And Will's insight back in 2015 is that there's actually a lot of pretty important stuff that
happens in the shadows where we don't talk about it as much. Where because of the nature of how the
court deals with those matters, there's just not nearly as much access to them. There's not nearly
as much public discussion of them. The most important thing I hope folks take away, at least
from our conversation, even
if they don't pick up the book, is that actually most of what the Supreme Court does is over there
in the shadows, not in front of us on the merits docket. By volume, it's 99% of the Supreme Court's
work comes through unsigned, unexplained orders. And a lot of those orders are unimportant and we don't care much about them, but not
all of them.
Right?
And so the basic gist of the book is, hey, here's a big part of what the Supreme Court
does that we don't know a lot about, that we don't talk a lot about, and that I think
folks who are not the sort of uber legal nerds may not even be fully aware exists. When you say that 99% of their work comes in the shadows, does that also
include their denials?
They're like, we're not hearing your case, you get nothing, nothing for you.
Goodbye.
Does that include that?
It does.
And so one of the things I think some folks may already know about the Supreme
Court, but I think a lot of folks may not fully appreciate is today and really since 1988, almost all
of the Supreme Court's merits docket, right?
Almost all of the cases in which the justices have multiple rounds of briefing or oral argument
are cases that the justices have chosen to hear.
So just for example, I mean, this most recent term, the court decided 58 cases on its merit stocket,
all but one of those were cases the justices chose to decide. There was one, what we call mandatory
appeal. And what that means, Sharon, is that a lot of what the court does by volume, by impact,
and just by math is deciding which cases to hear and which cases not to hear. The justices get somewhere between four and 6,000
petitions for review, what we call certiorari every year.
And so just the biggest chunk of data
in Supreme Court decision-making is when the court says,
hey, we're not gonna hear your case
and we're gonna let the last ruling by a lower court,
whether it's a federal appeals court
or a state Supreme Court, be the last word.
People are always curious about when the Supreme court does not agree to take a
case, to what extent does that represent agreement with the lower court versus
just a topic they're not interested in versus something where like, listen, we've
already heard 22 cases about this topic.
We're not taking another one.
Do you have a sense of the ratio of how that works?
No.
Because they don't tell you.
They don't tell you.
Right.
I mean, Sharon, it is such an illustrative question because that would be so helpful
to know.
And yet the court not only doesn't give us any indication of why it's not taking up a
case, but it has told us over and over again that people like you and me should not read
anything into.
We are not allowed to draw any inferences.
And that's not, of course, the same thing as when the court hands down a
massive, lengthy opinion, say, on affirmative action or religion or abortion. But as the book
tries to explain, it actually is, in some respects, a critical part of how we get to those decisions.
Even when the court says, you can't read anything into our denials, the denials often
still have massive practical effects.
One of the stories the book tells is when it came to the legalization of same sex marriage.
I think a lot of folks just assume that the critical moment was the Supreme Court's 2015
decision in a case called Obergefell versus Hodges on the merits docket, it actually turns out that
if you really pull apart the cases, that Obergefell itself only legalized same-sex marriage in
13 states.
By the time the court decided Obergefell, 19 states had legalized same-sex marriage
on their own, and 18 had had same-sex marriage legalized by federal court rulings that the
Supreme Court declined to
review. And so there's a very, I think, hopefully accessible example where in 18 states, same-sex
marriage became legal because of denials of certiorari, and only 13 did it become legal
because of a marriage rule. That's an unusually visible example of the broader phenomenon of just how much power the court
actually exercises even when it is declining to take a case.
Out of personal curiosity, even though they say like, listen, don't read into it, it doesn't
mean anything, but do you personally now look back with the hindsight being 2020 and trace a connection between those more
than a dozen denials to their future decision. What is your personal inference
from the example that you just gave? So the first thing to say is that we all
remember that the Supreme Court is a they not an it, right? And so different
justices might have been voting to deny Sir Sherari for different reasons.
I think the best I can say, and the book says this in print, is that I think at least for
the justice who was probably the critical swing vote, Chief Justice Roberts, I think
the consideration that probably drove it was he was willing to let same-sex marriage be
legalized without the Supreme Court's imprimatur, but he was not willing to let same-sex marriage be legalized
without the Supreme Court's imprimatur,
but he was not willing to have the Supreme Court bless it.
And so when it was simply a matter of staying out
of the issue, right, he was comfortable keeping the court
out of that fight.
But once the court's hand was forced,
once one of the lower courts ruled the other way
and created what we call a circuit split,
that's when the court had to intervene and Che Chief Justice Roberts ended up dissenting on the merits.
Can you explain for somebody who's not familiar what the concept of a circuit split is and why
that might force the Supreme Court's hand? So before 1891, the Supreme Court had no
control over its docket. Basically, if Congress said, hey, Supreme Court, you can hear this case, then the court had
to hear the case.
Before the Civil War, that was not a big deal.
The courts hear them 50, 60 cases a year.
By 1880, there were 1800 cases on the court's docket.
They were three and a half years behind.
That was not going to work.
So with the power to sort of have discretion over which cases the court's gonna hear, which we see the first
step toward in 1891, the big step is 1925,
Sharon comes the question of what are gonna be the cases
that the court does take?
What are gonna be the cases where the court really does feel
impelled to exercise its discretion?
So one set of cases is what we just call
the uber important questions of federal law,
right? Where it's just a massively important question. We don't care what the lower court
said. We need to decide this. So, you know, affirmative action, abortion, like the big hot
button stuff. But then there's also the problem of the court of appeals in California says the law
means one thing. The court of appeals in Texas says it means something else. We don't actually think this is a big deal, but
the law should be uniform. And so we're going to take this case not because it's
super important, but because we can't abide having the law be different in two
different places. So those are the two most common types of cases the Supreme
Court takes today, where the two different lower courts have disagreed on a question of federal law,
or where there's no disagreement, but the justices are of the view that resolving the question at the
Supreme Court level is just too important to not take the case now.
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I'm sure you know that approval of the Supreme Court is at a very, very low point in history.
Probably we pay more attention to the Supreme Court now than people did a hundred years
ago.
I don't know that you can make an argument that my grandmother even knew one Supreme
Court case.
Maybe she knew Brown v. Board because that was the era she was raising her children in,
and it had a transformative effect on America.
But I don't know that the average American was like, well, what is the court up to in
the 1940s, aside from some of these really, really transformative cases?
So there is, in my estimation, the information is more readily accessible because it's easy
to find online, more people are commenting on it and sharing the information online, etc.
And it seems as though the American public does not approve of this system. It doesn't approve of
some of the justices, which that's a separate topic. I think the concept of a shadow docket,
first of all, is poorly understood. The name, the shadow docket, makes it seem nefarious and intent.
The idea that they're out there just constantly making calculated moves
also gives this feeling, even if the calculated moves are completely benevolent.
The fact that it's calculated gives some people pause and makes them feel as though there is some kind of
like grand master plan and I don't like the way this is going.
I don't like the direction it's heading or maybe the opposite.
Maybe they love it.
So what are your feelings about the overall public perception of the workings of the court?
Does the shadow docket damage the court's credibility?
I'm gonna be a bit long-winded in my answer.
I'm sorry in advance, but let me start by saying,
I think part of the shift that you described
in your question from our parents
and our grandparents' generation to our generation,
yes, is a function of media,
but Sharon, part of it is also a function
of the shadow docket, by which I mean like, the Supreme Court 50, 75, 100 years ago was not deciding as a percentage of
its decisions nearly as many socially divisive cases. That yes, there were cases like Brown
versus Board of Education, but those were maybe three or four a year in a court that's deciding
150 to 200 cases, right?
Those were like one or 2%, even of the merits decisions, the court is handing down.
Versus today when the court, because it now has since 1988, almost complete control.
We talked before about how only one of the court's 58 decisions this term was a
case the court had to hear that now it's not just that it feels like the court is more
invested in these big divisive topics. I think that data shows that it is
more invested because the justices are with all of this power to set their agenda,
choosing an agenda that is injecting them into more and more divisive
context. The student loan program, right?
Like that's controversial as a policy matter.
There were lots of ways the court
could have not taken that case.
The affirmative action cases, right?
The way the court took them,
it actually jumped over the federal appeals court.
So I actually think there's a connection here
that we should articulate
before even getting to the immediate question.
To the meat of your question,
I don't think the shadow docket is inherently nefarious your question, I don't think the shadow docket
is inherently nefarious. Just like I don't think the term is inherently nefarious. Shadows are not
per se nefarious. They're just the natural consequence of having light sources obscured
by objects. The problem is that I think there's a lot of distrust among lots of folks in the public and in the media, partly because the stories
about the Supreme Court that we hear so often are so focused on the merits docket, where
in the biggest, most visible cases, the justices are most often dividing along the conventional
partisan or ideological lines.
One of the things that I really hope the book does is it suggests that, yes, there are problems with the
shadow docket, but they're not actually the same problems. That the problems on the shadow docket are institutional,
not ideological. That it's not six conservatives versus three liberals. It's a court that for most of its history was
much more accountable to the political branches that now as an institution
both is less accountable and acts as if it's less accountable.
Adam Felsenfeld And so I guess I'm trying to sort of suggest that there are a lot of reasons to be
critical of the current Supreme Court that don't sound in, that aren't limited to, that don't reduce
to six conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents versus three liberal
justices appointed by Democratic presidents. I'm trying to suggest, yes, the way the current
court uses the shadow doctrine is a problem, but not because of who the current court is.
But it's a broader issue and it's not about the current makeup of y'all. It is like a
bigger issue than that.
And just as importantly, and it's not about the bottom lines, right? I mean, we are so
accustomed to thinking about the court as a function of whether we like
or dislike the bottom lines, right?
So whether we're pro-abortion or anti-abortion informs our assessment of how the court handled
Roe, right?
Whether we're pro-affirmative action or anti-affirmative action colors our assessment of what the court
should have done in the affirmative action cases.
And I think that that's both woefully incomplete because we're not looking at
the court in institutional terms. And I actually think Sharon, it perpetuates a
really dangerous way of looking at the court if we think that everything it does
is guided by ideology and partisanship, as opposed to if we look at the court as
an institution where we might think even if we like the bottom lines,
there are problems with its relationship with the other branches, or we might think if we don't like the bottom line,
we actually still think it ought to have all this. At its core, part of the story the book is trying to tell is that
recent behavior by the court, even though it's typified by the conservative justice because they have the votes, is really a reflection not on anything
about the conservative legal movement
or conservative legal philosophy.
And it's really much more about the dangers of a court
that has become increasingly unchecked.
Dangers that I think we would see just as much
if the politics were flipped.
And we had a six to three liberal majority of justices.
Yeah, so what you're saying is the issues are with the structure and not with the decisions
themselves. And you can agree or disagree with the decisions themselves. And there is still an issue
with the structure and the function of the way the court is currently operating.
I think, I mean, what's interesting to me is like,
we are used to having that conversation
in the context of the political branches, right?
So we've had for decades,
debates about executive power that have transcended,
whether the current president is a Democrat or Republican.
Should the president have the power
to unilaterally engage in drone strikes?
That's a debate that we've had across multiple pres good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a to everybody, is that this is a conversation that we used to have
about the court and that we've stopped having. And I think that that actually is a real problem,
both because it is obscuring a lot of problems that, Sharon, we might all agree are problems,
and because it means that the conversation we are having is pitched in the most partisan and
ideological terms there could possibly be because it's focused on the most partisan and ideological terms there could possibly be because it's focused
on the most overtly ideological feature of the court's work.
I think one of the issues, Steve,
is that even if people agree, like, yeah,
we should be having these conversations,
just like we debate the filibuster in the Senate,
just like we are talking about these other structural issues,
like to what extent should a president be able to use the executive order to create government programs
or student loan forgiveness or whatever,
even if we are willing to engage in those conversations,
which I think a lot of people in good faith are.
The issue with the court is that people feel
completely powerless to do anything.
We might be able to be like, listen, that guy is a bad
guy and I'm not voting for him in Congress next time. I don't like him. He
is not good for America. We might be able to make those kinds of changes. Like, that
is not true with the court. And so it really, really irks people and it feels
like there's absolutely no power of the citizenry, that it's not we the people, it's the nine, it's not us.
And I bet this is not the first,
I'm not the first person to express this feeling to you,
but I think some people wonder like,
to what end should we be having this conversation
when it feels like there's absolutely nothing we can do?
That's exactly why we should be having this conversation,
because there's a lot we can do.
My favorite example of this,
I think we can probably all agree that the Supreme Court would have a
heck of a time operating without a budget if it had no money. I mean, the constitution
requires Congress to pay the justices their salaries, but nothing else. And so if the
Supreme Court's budget were just the nine salaries of the justices, Congress would be
fulfilling its constitutional obligation.
Have fun with no clerks, have fun with no building.
Did you want air conditioning?
Do you want computers?
I mean, right?
But the reason why I start with the budget is because this is not something Congress
takes away.
This is something Congress gives, right?
Congress every year appropriates money to the Supreme Court for its budget.
Congress could stop doing that.
It's not going
to. So the court is already dependent upon Congress and through Congress voters just to operate.
And if we go past that, the court is dependent upon Congress for its docket. Congress has the
power to say which case of the court can and can't hear. The court is dependent upon Congress
for having a building, as you say, right until 1935. The court
sat in the Capitol in case anyone needed reminding of who was in charge. And so, I think we feel
powerless, Sharon, because we have forgotten all of this. And we have forgotten that the way the
Constitution is set up, and this is not a matter of debate among liberals and conservatives. This is just an objective fact.
Congress has the big stick when it comes to not the substance of what the Supreme Court does,
but basically the sort of the institutional features of its work.
And there have been times in our history where Congress has used that stick.
Congress basically prevented the court from even sitting in 1802 because it was mad at the Federalists.
In 1869, Congress prevents the court from deciding a massively important case about reconstruction
because Congress was worried the court would decide it wrong.
Congress in 1964 gave every federal judge a significant pay raise except the Supreme Court justices
because Congress was mad at the justices.
And so I think part of the problem is that we don't think about that anymore.
We don't ask our representatives, hey, are you going to fund the Supreme Court?
And so I guess we're so fixated on are we voting for a Democrat or voting for a Republican
that we've stopped voting for institutionalists.
There was a time not that long ago where there were members of Congress
who were institutionalists first.
You had liberal Republicans,
you had conservative Democrats.
And now that we have sort of everyone
in such neat, tidy camps,
it's the institutional part of that story
that's fallen by the boards.
That doesn't mean it can't be resuscitated and revived,
but we've got to be the ones to do it
by having conversations like this.
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Let's say we have this conversation and we all agree that the shadow docket is like,
yeah, that this is not how this court should be optimally functioning.
And we agree like, yeah, okay, well,
we can pressure Congress to not fund them
until they make changes, until they fix it.
Whose responsibility is it to fix it?
Is it Congress passing a law to say,
here is how you need to work?
Is it forcing the court to enact its own rules about
things like ethics and merits cases and whose responsibility is it to fix the structural issues
within the court? So, I mean, this is going to be a cop out of an answer, but both of them. And what
I mean is that they have both overlapping and independent responsibilities. So no matter what, I think Congress really ought to reassert a modicum of institutional control over
the court. It can be really, really low hanging fruit, like just give them the court a few more
categories of cases it has to hear. It can be slightly higher hanging fruit, like telling the
court when it can and can't grant so-called emergency applications, when a party's trying
to get a state to block or unblock a lower court decision, that I think has to come from
Congress.
But I think the justices can go a long way toward both facilitating those kinds of reforms
and also moving the need for more aggressive reforms if they show a bit more responsiveness.
And something the book talks about toward the end is actually, at least on the
shadow docket side of things, the court has been a little responsive to critiques.
I mean, we have seen a bit of a shift.
There's a real uptick in what the book is very critical of vis-a-vis the
court's behavior, especially in emergency applications in 2020 and 2021.
And we've seen the court walk back from that brink, especially justices especially in emergency applications in 2020 and 2021.
And we've seen the court walk back from that brink, especially justices Kavanaugh and Barrett,
at least at the same time as there was a massive
public pushback against the court's behavior.
So I guess to me, the way that we have changed
is first we show the court that there is bipartisan consensus that some of these structural
behaviors are problematic, that there's a bipartisan consensus that the court should be part of a
coordinate federal system, not aloof from it, but also having Congress remind the court directly
that the court is not its own keeper and that our separation of powers works best.
If I can be a real nerd and quote Madison for a second, what ambition is made to counteract
ambition when each branch is pushing at the limits of its power against the other branches.
We have plenty of ambition on the Supreme Court right now.
We've got plenty of ambition in the executive branch across different presidencies of different
parties.
There's so little institutional ambition in Congress right now that even though the court
could do a lot of this itself, I think the long-term solution is for Congress to reassert
more of the control that it exercised for most of the first 200 years.
One of the cases that I was just talking about with some people is about this concept of
legal innocence and how being legally innocent is not enough
to get you another hearing anymore.
Like if people, if you're a court watcher,
the case is Jones v. Hendricks,
that legal innocence isn't good enough.
That's just like one example,
aside from those highly, highly divisive issues.
Most Americans, I would argue that 80 plus percent
of Americans think it's really,
really wrong to imprison people who are innocent. Right? Like we should all, does not matter
which name you checked in the voting booth, we should all want a justice system that imprisons
the guilty and does not imprison the innocent. That seems really foundational. Right? Sometimes
we get it wrong. Yes, it's
an inevitability in a system run by humans, but we should work to correct our wrongs, right?
I think most people would agree with that, that we should work to correct our wrongs.
And it seems like that the court is saying, no, what's most important is the procedures were not followed.
The procedures were not followed.
You used up all of your chances,
you used up all of your tries,
and I'm sorry, you will now have to
remain in prison even though you are legally innocent.
Of course, I'm over-exaggerating it.
Not by much.
I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist.
That's the gist of Jones v. Hendricks is like,
you used up all your chances. Doesn't matter if you're legally innocent.
Jones is such a great example, Sharon. You know, I have a weekly newsletter about the
Supreme Court, One First, that's on Substack, and I wrote about Jones. And the title of
my piece about Jones is The Unnecessary Cruelty of Jones vs. Hendricks. What I find striking
about Jones without getting too far into the very dense technical weeds
is that even if you believe that the relevant statutes bar Mr. Jones from getting out of
prison even though he was legally innocent, it seems to me that it would have been easy
enough for those same six justices to devote the last couple of paragraphs of their opinion
to an invitation to Congress to fix
this. Our job as judges is to apply the law. You've written the law. We've thinned the law.
Your law's bad.
The law's bad. Hey, Congress, fix the law. And we have an example. Justice Ginsburg's dissent in
the Ledbetter case led to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to fix a discrepancy in pay equity
at the federal statutory level.
And instead of a couple of paragraphs that say, we don't like this result,
but we're not policymakers.
And it seems to me that like, that's the mentality we shouldn't even reflect on
whether this is unfair and suggest Congress should fix it.
That's a symptom of this disease of the court
being just insulated from even basic human decency where the court could with perfectly clean hands
say, hey, we don't like this interpretation of the statute. We think Congress should fix it,
but that's Congress's job. And there's none of that in Jones. And that to me was the most
indefensible part.
I had problems with the statutory analysis too,
but let's assume that they got the statutes right.
Why not admit that the statutes as they've read them are grotesquely unfair?
This idea that it's fine,
there's nothing wrong with this decision,
that attitude of we don't care about the effect of our orders.
It doesn't matter if it affects you perversely.
It does not matter to us.
That's the overall tone and spirit that some, not all, that some of these decisions are
written with it, to your point.
And they could have easily thrown in two or three sentences or a paragraph at the end of like, listen,
this is a bad law.
They could have said people who are legally innocent should not be imprisoned.
But the way that it's written, you have tied our hands.
You've tied our hands, Congress.
You need to fix it.
Right.
She reminded you, Congress.
Yeah, that's right.
And then there could have been public pressure on Congress to fix it,
but instead the public does not know that that is a problem that is Congress's to fix.
And this goes back to the sort of the broader theme that I think we've been touching on
throughout this conversation, which is in a world in which the court understood itself and viewed
itself as being in this ongoing inter-branch dialogue with Congress
about its docket, about the law, about the structure of our government.
I think that kind of de dumas to the opinion would have been much more likely.
One other really trite example of this.
Every December 31st, the Chief Justice gives this year-end report
on the state of the federal judiciary that usually gets no attention from anyone other than the Supreme Court press
court.
The practice was inaugurated by Warren Burger in the mid-1970s in sort of typical Burger
fashion because Burger wanted to have his own state of the union.
And so he wanted to like elevate the visibility of the Chief Justice.
But it had a very specific substantive point, which was it was Berger's
wish list to Congress. Like, hey, Congress, here's what we need for next year. And that
practice continued for the rest of Berger's tenure. It continues for all of Rehnquist's
tenure as Chief Justice. And it's only in 2009 that John Roberts stops asking for stuff.
And that's just another sort of illustration of the phenomenon that the book is trying
to put into context.
There is a direct correlation between a court that has removed itself from the inner branch
conversation and a court that has come to play such an outsized role in so many features
and facets of our public lives.
And that whether we might like
the bottom lines that the current court is reaching,
we might hate them.
The point is that there ought to be at least
some consensus that institutionally,
this is not the healthiest thing for our system.
I'm picking up what you're putting down, Steve.
And I think the average American absolutely does too.
And I think they can understand
this need for a broader conversation because even if
you're like, yes, I'm super pro-life, love that decision, I'm against race-based affirmative
action, love their decision, even if those are all of your opinions, it is still important
to have healthy institutions in the United States and we cannot have them if we are just basing all of our
conversations on ideology. You can ideologically agree on something and the institution can be
unhealthy. They're not mutually exclusive. And if people take nothing else away from the book,
or at least from our time together today, like that is the best summary of the bottom line.
Thank you so much for being here today. I could, we could probably keep talking for like four or five hours.
I could be like, what about pork producers V Ross, Steve?
I have so many things I want to talk about, but we will not subject the listener
to our many hours long conversation about that.
I will.
I wish I'll, this will not be the last time we meet Steve.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me Sharon. This is a lot of fun
You can buy Steve Vladek's book the shadow docket wherever you like to buy books
Got to get my plug in there for bookshop.org and you can also
Subscribe to his free newsletter called one first. It's just like Steve Vladek got substack comm
He sends out a weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court.
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