from the judges-are-tired-of-this-scotus dept
When federal judges with decades of experience start publicly mocking the Supreme Court’s lack of clarity, you know the system is broken. This week brought us two remarkable examples of lower court judges who are clearly fed up with trying to parse the Supreme Court’s “vibes-based jurisprudence” from its unexplained shadow docket rulings.
First, we had Senior U.S. District Judge William Young—a Reagan appointee with 47 years on the bench—publicly “apologizing” to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh after they accused him of “defying” the Supreme Court. His crime? Following established precedent instead of guessing what unexplained emergency orders might mean.
Then we got Judge Allison Burroughs, who packed her ruling with footnoted snark about how the Supreme Court’s recent emergency rulings “have not been models of clarity” and leave courts to navigate “a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape” without much actual guidance.
Both cases stem from the same underlying chaos: As we wrote about earlier, the Supreme Court’s shadow docket has become a “lawless mess” where justices issue “extremely consequential rulings with either no explanation at all, or with barely a paragraph of reasoning.” Now we’re seeing the inevitable result: experienced judges openly expressing contempt for the Court’s approach.
We’ll start with the first one: Judge Young’s “apology”:
“I really feel it’s incumbent upon me to, on the record here, apologize to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if they think that anything this court has done has been done in defiance of a precedential action of the Supreme Court in the United States,” he said.
What exactly did Young do that was so terrible? He ordered the Trump administration to reinstate hundreds of millions of dollars in NIH research grants that had been canceled for supporting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and LGBTQ+ health care. The Supreme Court paused his order in a 5-4 decision, saying such cases must be heard in the specialist U.S. Court of Federal Claims, not district court.
But Gorsuch and Kavanaugh didn’t just disagree with Young’s jurisdictional analysis. They accused him of deliberately defying Supreme Court precedent, writing:
Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them
The problem? Young had reasonably distinguished between shadow docket rulings (“interim relief”) and actual binding precedent from full merits decisions. But the two Justices seemed personally offended by this distinction that any experienced judge would consider uncontroversial.
Here are the two Justices whining about Young not following their not-actually-a-precedent:
In casting California aside, the district court stressed that the Court there granted only interim relief pending appeal and a writ of certiorari and did not issue a final judgment on the merits. ___ F. Supp. 3d, at ___, App. 229a. True enough. But this Court often addresses requests for interim relief—sometimes pending a writ of certiorari, as in California, and sometimes after a writ of certiorari is granted, as in Mahmoud v. Taylor, 606 U. S. ___ (2025), and Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, 606 U. S. ___ (2025). And either way, when this Court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts
That’s fucking obnoxious. The Court issues these “interim” shadow docket rulings on a nearly weekly basis—with little briefing, no oral arguments, and minimal explanation—then demands lower courts treat them as binding precedent. It’s constitutional law by judicial decree, and the “respect our authority!” attitude just reinforces how far the Court has drifted from legitimate legal process.
Judges shouldn’t have to engage in SCOTUSology to read the tea leaves and vibes emanating from 1 First Street.
Young’s response reveals just how broken this system has become:
Young said he never meant to run afoul of Supreme Court precedent, but at the time of his June ruling, he “simply did not understand that orders on the emergency docket were precedent,” unlike opinions it issued when it hears cases on the merits.
A judge with nearly five decades of experience is pointing out that this has never been how precedent works—and the sarcasm in his “apology” to two justices with far less bench experience is hard to miss. The Supreme Court has created an impossible situation where lower courts must follow “precedent” consisting of unexplained emergency rulings issued without full briefing or oral arguments. Even highly experienced judges can’t figure out what they’re supposed to do when constitutional law operates by vibes rather than reasoned legal analysis.
Meanwhile, Judge Burroughs took a different approach in her Harvard ruling. Rather than apologizing, she delivered what might be the most devastating judicial snark of the year. Faced with the same confusing Supreme Court guidance, she flat out said “this is not Calvinball” (echoing Justice Jackson’s warnings) and proceeded to rule based on actual binding precedent:
It may well be that these differences would not distinguish these claims in the eyes of the Supreme Court, although that remains unclear under existing caselaw. But this is not Calvinball and there are rules. Under those rules, which are set by existing Supreme Court precedent, this Court cannot conclude that core First Amendment claims or pure statutory violations fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Court of Federal Claims. A contract claim is, by its nature about money and, for present purposes, whether the government is obligated to pay money under a contract. The First Amendment claims here are about speech and whether the federal government is improperly infringing on the free speech rights of an academic institution and its employees. The resolution of these claims might result in money changing hands, but what is fundamentally at issue is a bedrock constitutional principle rather than the interpretation of contract terms
But her real masterpiece was the footnote where she directly called out the Supreme Court’s lack of clarity:
The Court is mindful of Justice Gorsuch’s comments in his opinion in APHA and fully agrees that this Court is not free to “defy” Supreme Court decisions and is, in fact, “duty-bound to respect ‘the hierarchy of the federal court system.’” APHA, 2025 WL 2415669, at *3 (Gorsuch, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (citation omitted). Consistent with these obligations, this Court (and likely all district courts) endeavors to follow the Supreme Court’s rulings, “no matter how misguided [it] may think [them] to be.” Hutto v. Davis, 454 U.S. 370, 375 (1982) (per curiam). That said, the Supreme Court’s recent emergency docket rulings regarding grant terminations have not been models of clarity, and have left many issues unresolved. California was a four-paragraph per curiam decision issued in the context of a stay application. It cited Bowen as good law, stated that the Tucker Act gave the Court of Federal Claims jurisdiction over contract claims against the federal government, and then stated that the district court likely lacked jurisdiction “to order the payment of money under the APA,” without purporting to explain how the case was distinguishable from Bowen or other related, longstanding precedents. California, 145 S. Ct. at 968.
Then, in APHA, four justices thought grant-termination cases belong, in full, in the Court of Federal Claims, and four justices thought they belong, in full, in federal district court, and the decision was controlled by the vote of a single justice. 2025 WL 2415669, at 1–16. The outcome, which no party had requested, was, thus, inconsistent with the views of eight justices, id. at 16 (Jackson, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part), and, again, provided little explanation as to how Bowen, which the controlling concurrence again cited as good law, id. at *2, applied or was distinguishable.
This Court understands, of course, that the Supreme Court, like the district courts, is trying to resolve these issues quickly, often on an emergency basis, and that the issues are complex and evolving. See Trump v. CASA, Inc., 145 S. Ct. 2540, 2567 (2025) (Kavanaugh, J., concurring) (“In justiciable cases, this Court, not the district courts or courts of appeals, will often still be the ultimate decisionmaker as to the interim legal status of major new federal statutes and executive actions.”). Given this, however, the Court respectfully submits that it is unhelpful and unnecessary to criticize district courts for “defy[ing]” the Supreme Court when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape, where they must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus.
That’s judicial snark at its finest—a respectful but devastating takedown of the Court’s approach. Between Young’s sarcastic “apology” and Burroughs’s footnoted smackdown, we’re seeing experienced federal judges openly express their frustration with the Supreme Court’s shadow docket chaos.
This isn’t just bad legal process—it’s the breakdown of how precedent is supposed to work. When federal judges with decades of experience can’t figure out what counts as binding law, and when they’re reduced to either sarcastic apologies or footnoted smackdowns to express their frustration, the system has failed.
The real tragedy is that both judges did exactly what they’re supposed to do: follow established precedent until the Supreme Court clearly overrules it. Instead, they’re being criticized for not being psychic enough to divine constitutional meaning from unexplained emergency orders.
The Supreme Court has turned constitutional interpretation from a legal process into a guessing game where even experienced federal judges don’t know the rules. That’s not just institutional dysfunction—it’s judicial authoritarianism dressed up as emergency procedure.
Filed Under: allison burroughs, brett kavanaugh, emergency docket, interim relief, neil gorsuch, precedent, scotus, shadow docket, supreme court, william young
