Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an audience at the University of Alabama Law School on Thursday that the Supreme Court is fielding an "unprecedented" flood of emergency appeals, a workload shift she said the justices brought on themselves. Her remarks laid bare a growing internal rift over how the Court handles what critics call the "shadow docket," even as the current term's biggest decisions keep piling up.

The comments came as the Court's 2025, 2026 term heads toward its expected June conclusion and as the Trump administration continues to press the justices for fast-track relief on policy disputes blocked by lower courts.

Sotomayor, the Court's senior liberal justice, did not mince words. Newsweek reported her telling the Alabama audience:

"The newspapers are filled with reports about how many emergency motions we are receiving. It's unprecedented in the court's history."

She added bluntly: "We've done it to ourselves."

What the numbers show

The scale of the shift is hard to dispute. Politico has reported that the Trump administration filed roughly 30 emergency applications with the Court over the past 15 months. The Court ruled in the administration's favor more than 80 percent of the time on those filings.

Emergency applications, formally separate from the Court's merits docket, often produce rulings with no written opinion explaining the majority's reasoning. That practice has drawn criticism from both ends of the bench, though for very different reasons.

Sotomayor framed the problem as a philosophical divide among the justices. She told the Alabama audience that some of her colleagues believe lower-court injunctions blocking federal law inflict irreparable harm on Congress and the public.

"There are members of my court...who believe that when Congress passes a law, it causes Congress and the people irreparable harm to have that law ignored...It has changed the paradigm on the court."

That framing is worth examining carefully. The justices who take that view, largely the Court's conservative majority, are not inventing a procedural trick. They are applying a straightforward principle: when a duly enacted federal statute is suspended by a single district judge, the government has standing to seek immediate relief. Whether one likes the policy or not, the argument has legal weight. The Court's recent willingness to intervene in politically charged disputes reflects that same logic.

The shadow docket debate, and who's really driving it

Sotomayor's complaints are not new. Last year, she lodged a sharp dissent in a case involving the government's authority to remove illegal immigrants to countries other than those listed on their removal orders. In that dissent, she wrote:

"Today's order clarifies only one thing: Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial. Respectfully, I dissent."

That line, "speed dial", captures the liberal grievance neatly. But it also sidesteps a question the left rarely wants to answer: who forced the administration onto the emergency docket in the first place?

In case after case, lower-court judges, many appointed by Democratic presidents, have issued sweeping nationwide injunctions halting executive-branch policies. When a single federal judge in, say, a district court can freeze a policy affecting 330 million people, the losing party has little choice but to seek emergency relief at the highest level. The "unprecedented" volume of emergency filings is, in large part, a downstream consequence of unprecedented lower-court activism.

Sotomayor's framing puts the blame on her conservative colleagues for agreeing to hear those appeals. A more complete picture would note that the pipeline starts well below the marble steps of One First Street.

Conservative justices push back, carefully

Not every member of the Court's conservative wing is comfortable with the pace. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of three justices appointed by President Trump during his first term, addressed the issue last year at the Eighth Circuit Judicial Conference. He acknowledged the Court is "doing more and more process to try to get the right answer on those preliminary assessments," but flagged a risk.

"There can be a risk in writing the opinion of lock-in effect, of making a snap judgment and putting it in writing, in the written opinion, that is not going to reflect the final view."

Kavanaugh's concern is procedural, not ideological. He is not arguing the Court should refuse to act on emergency filings. He is warning that issuing detailed written opinions at the emergency stage could box the justices into positions before full briefing and oral argument. That is a legitimate institutional worry, and it comes from a conservative justice, not a liberal one.

Justice Elena Kagan, speaking at a judicial conference in California last year, offered a different critique. She argued that courts owe explanations to the public regardless of the procedural posture.

"Courts are supposed to explain things. They're supposed to explain things to litigants. They're supposed to explain things to the public, generally."

Kagan's point has surface appeal. Transparency matters. But her argument, taken to its logical end, would slow the emergency docket to a crawl, which may be precisely the point. If the goal is to make it harder for the government to get timely relief from overreaching lower-court orders, demanding full written opinions on every emergency application is one way to do it.

A busy term, and a Court under pressure from all sides

The Court's current 6-3 conservative majority has not been a rubber stamp for anyone. In February, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both Trump first-term appointees, joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court's three liberal justices to form a majority holding that a 1977 law does not authorize the president to implement tariffs. That decision drew a pointed response from President Trump, who said he was "absolutely ashamed" of the justices who ruled against him and called them "disloyal to our Constitution."

The tariffs ruling is a reminder that the conservative majority is not monolithic. Gorsuch, Barrett, and Roberts broke with the administration on a high-profile question of executive power. Whatever one thinks of the merits, the decision undercuts the narrative, popular on the left, that the Court simply does the White House's bidding.

The current term has produced a string of consequential rulings. The Court recently ruled 6-3 in Mahmoud v. Taylor, siding with Muslim and Christian parents who challenged Montgomery County Public Schools' refusal to let families opt their children out of instruction using LGBTQ-themed storybooks. Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion said the parents are likely to succeed on their claim that the school board's no-exceptions policy unconstitutionally burdens their religious exercise. The Court ordered the school board to notify parents in advance when the books would be used and to allow children to be excused from that instruction.

That ruling, like the tariffs case and the emergency docket disputes, reflects a Court grappling with fundamental questions about the limits of government power, whether exercised by a school board, a president, or a lower-court judge.

The term has also featured the Court backing a Christian counselor's free speech challenge to a Colorado conversion therapy ban, a case that drew a lone dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and added to the term's First Amendment profile.

Meanwhile, the political temperature around the Court remains high. Trump's historic appearance before the Court earlier this year drew heated reactions from Democrats, and the justices are well aware they are operating in a climate where every order, emergency or otherwise, becomes instant political ammunition.

The real question Sotomayor won't answer

Sotomayor's Thursday remarks frame the emergency docket surge as a self-inflicted wound. "We've done it to ourselves," she said. But that diagnosis conveniently omits the other half of the equation.

The Court is fielding more emergency applications because lower courts are issuing more sweeping injunctions against federal policy. The administration files emergency appeals because it has no other timely remedy. And the Court grants relief in those cases, more than 80 percent of the time, by Politico's count, because the lower-court orders frequently lack legal foundation.

If Sotomayor wants fewer emergency filings, the most direct path is fewer rogue nationwide injunctions from district courts. That is a reform conservatives have championed for years. It is telling that the justice chose instead to blame her own colleagues for responding to the problem rather than the judges who created it.

The Court has also been weighing closely watched gun-rights questions this term, a reminder that the emergency docket is only one piece of a workload that touches nearly every major policy debate in the country.

None of this means the shadow docket is beyond criticism. Kavanaugh's concern about premature lock-in is serious. Kagan's call for transparency has merit in principle. But the solution is not to slow-walk emergency relief until lower-court judges can entrench their preferred policy outcomes without review.

The real "unprecedented" change at the Supreme Court is not the number of emergency filings. It is the willingness of a conservative majority to actually enforce the law as written, and the discomfort that causes among those who preferred a Court that looked the other way.