The Supreme Court’s Summer Break Vanishes, Erased by Emergencies
New York Times · LC · trust 50/100
“Our summers used to actually be summers,” one justice lamented.
Listen · 11:44 min Share full article 1 Credit... Kenny Holston/The New York Times By Adam Liptak
Adam Liptak is the chief legal correspondent and host of The Docket .
“We do need a little break from each other,” he said last year in Buffalo.
That break is vanishing as emergency applications have started to dominate the court’s docket. Those intense and abbreviated proceedings, often yielding nominally temporary but vastly consequential rulings, have changed the way the justices work.
The emergency rulings stand in sharp contrast to the court’s ordinary work. From the first Monday in October through April, the justices hear oral arguments after studying two rounds of detailed briefs. Afterward, they meet in person to deliberate and, by early summer, issue lengthy opinions setting out their reasoning.
Then, back in the day, they would settle into a long vacation.
But when the justices return to the bench on Monday to hear the first argument of this term, in a case on climate change, they may not seem especially rested and refreshed.
The Trump administration filed its 41st emergency application earlier this week. That matched the number of such applications filed over the entirety of the president’s first term, which was itself unprecedented, according to a tally kept by Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown.
The fire hose of applications did not pause for the court’s summer recess. In just the past month or so, the court has twice weighed in on a Trump plan to curtail voting by mail , cleared the way for his White House ballroom , let him deport migrants to distant countries with which they had no connection and allowed his administration to use an expansive online system to let states hunt for ineligible voters.
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