The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent actions—or, as many legal observers would argue, its conspicuous lack of explanation—have thrown the American legal landscape into a state of flux, leaving lower courts, litigants, and the public alike wondering what, exactly, constitutes the law of the land on any given day. Over the last week, a series of high-profile decisions and events have underscored this uncertainty, as judges and advocacy groups grapple with the Court’s increasing reliance on the so-called "shadow docket"—emergency orders and summary decisions issued without the customary full opinions or public reasoning.
On August 14, 2025, the Supreme Court issued a brief, unexplained order denying a request from tech giants Facebook, YouTube, and X to block a Mississippi law that restricts minors’ access to their platforms, according to Law.com. This terse rejection, with no written reasoning or dissent, is just the latest example of the Court’s conservative majority making consequential decisions through emergency channels, leaving legal observers and lower courts in the dark about the rationale behind such moves.
This pattern of unexplained orders isn’t new, but it’s become far more frequent—and, some say, far more disruptive—in recent years. As Slate reports, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority has repeatedly altered or overturned precedent, often in cases involving former President Donald Trump, without providing clear explanations. The result is a legal system where lower-court judges are left to guess at the Supreme Court’s intentions, unsure whether to apply established law or anticipate a sudden, unexplained shift from above.
Nowhere was this dynamic more evident than in the actions of U.S. District Judge Myong Joun earlier this week. On August 13, Judge Joun issued an order refusing to halt his injunction protecting the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and its employees from termination, despite the Supreme Court having already frozen a related injunction—again, without explanation. The original injunction, issued by Joun in May, barred the Trump administration from firing so many Education Department employees that the agency could no longer function. When the Supreme Court stayed that order with no reasoning, the Justice Department promptly asked Joun to halt his second, related injunction as well.
Joun was having none of it. In his order, he wrote pointedly, "The Supreme Court did not make any explicit findings as to whether Defendants were likely to succeed on the merits or that other equitable considerations also militated against preliminary relief, or provide any other reasoning or explanation as to the basis for granting the stay." As Slate notes, Joun’s message was clear: without an explicit directive or explanation from the Supreme Court, he saw no reason to undo his own injunction. In effect, Joun was calling the Court’s bluff—refusing to preemptively legitimize what he characterized as lawless or arbitrary decision-making from above.
This approach has resonated with legal commentators and some fellow judges. Madiba Dennie, deputy editor of Balls and Strikes and author of The Originalism Trap, told Slate, "I’ve been hoping more judges would do this, because SCOTUS is not bothering to explain itself or give any sort of direction. It’s just saying an injunction was wrong somehow. So I think lower-court judges are well within their rights to say: I don’t know how this was wrong, so I have no reason to take a different course of action." Dennie added that shadow docket stays are not supposed to have any precedential value, and criticized the expectation that lower courts should "read our minds and realize we want to overrule Humphrey’s Executor. So act like it’s already overruled. That’s absurd."
This tension isn’t confined to disputes over the Education Department. In a related shadow docket case, DHS v. DVD, the Supreme Court lifted an injunction—again, without explanation—allowing the removal of individuals, potentially without due process, to countries where they aren’t from and could face harm. Liberal justices voiced strong objections, but with the injunction gone, lower courts were left scrambling. As Slate recounts, the lower-court judge in that case issued a separate remedial order to protect some defendants a little longer, since that specific order hadn’t been reviewed by the Supreme Court. It was, as Dennie put it, an example of "malicious compliance"—following the letter of the law while subtly resisting the spirit of the higher court’s unexplained intervention.
This growing uncertainty has left many in the legal community frustrated. With the Supreme Court taking fewer cases on the merits, lawyers and advocacy groups are increasingly turning to outside organizations to help catch the justices’ attention—and, perhaps more importantly, the attention of their clerks, according to Law.com. Meanwhile, advocacy groups and citizens are still fighting high-stakes battles before the Court. Latino citizens and advocacy organizations, for example, have asked the Court to maintain a federal district court order restricting the use of aggressive, dragnet tactics by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Los Angeles. Civil rights groups argue that these tactics amount to racial profiling, while the Trump administration is pushing for the Supreme Court to allow ICE to continue its crackdown without interference.
Against this backdrop of uncertainty and legal brinkmanship, the broader legal community is seeking new ways to make sense of the Supreme Court’s role in American governance. On August 15, 2025, SCOTUSblog announced the upcoming SCOTUSblog Summit: On the Merits, co-hosted with the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The event, set to feature Justice Amy Coney Barrett as keynote speaker, promises to bring together legal experts, Fortune 50 general counsels, regulatory leaders, and law professors to explore how the courts are shaping governance, policymaking, and democracy. Justice Barrett will also discuss her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.
The summit comes at a time when the Court’s influence on American life—and the opacity of its decision-making—are under intense scrutiny. Recent news roundups from SCOTUSblog have highlighted ongoing legal battles, from disputes over tribal ticketing in Oklahoma (despite a Supreme Court ruling) to Ghislaine Maxwell’s petition to the Court and the political impacts of Trump and Chief Justice John Roberts. As the Court’s emergency orders continue to reshape the legal landscape, the need for dialogue, transparency, and accountability has never seemed more urgent.
For lower-court judges like Myong Joun, the message to the Supreme Court is simple: if you want the law to change, say so—plainly and publicly. Until then, judges will keep doing their jobs, following the law as it stands, and refusing to "read the minds" of justices who choose not to explain themselves. In this era of shadow dockets and silent decisions, that stubborn insistence on clarity may be the only thing keeping the legal system grounded.