The Supreme Court’s emergency docket dominated 2025, with the justices considering a surge of challenges to President Donald Trump’s actions that upended its normal operations and resulted in an unusual pace of rulings largely siding with the administration.
The year’s packed emergency docket, dubbed the shadow docket by critics, produced some of the court’s most notable moments, including a rare rebuke from Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh that lower courts were ignoring its precedent.
Below are several of the highlights from oral arguments and opinions in 2025:
‘Calvinball Jurisprudence’
The court’s newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has frequently criticized rulings she opposes, drew attention in August for dissenting from an emergency order letting the Trump administration cancel over $700 million in medical research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Jackson accused the conservative majority of “Calvinball jurisprudence,” referencing the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, in which game rules change each round.
“Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules,” she wrote. “We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”
The court has faced scrutiny this year over a surge of unsigned emergency orders, which typically offer little or no explanation.
The Trump administration has prevailed in most matters, with the justices pausing lower court rulings that blocked actions tied to agency firings, immigration enforcement, and the withholding of billions in foreign aid approved by Congress. In an emergency docket setback for the administration that split court conservatives, the justices on Tuesday refused to let Trump start deploying National Guard troops in Chicago as part of immigration enforcement efforts and to help fight violent crime.
Federal judges left to interpret the court’s actions have also complained about the rise in emergency orders, with one writing in September that they haven’t been “models of clarity.”
Rebuking Judges
Gorsuch, joined by Kavanaugh, expressed frustration about how lower courts have dealt with challenges to executive action in a concurring opinion in the August NIH order. Judges are allowed to disagree with the justices’ decisions, Gorsuch wrote, but are “never free to defy them.”
The opinion jolted the judiciary, with multiple judges pushing back against Gorsuch in written opinions and public comments. Judge Pamela Harris of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in September remarks called the admonishment “really unfortunate.”
“It suddenly feels a little bit adversarial,” she said. “And it ought not feel like that between both court judges and the Supreme Court.”
Boston-based district judge William Young, who had temporarily blocked Trump from cutting medical research grants prior to the Supreme Court’s intervention, also said in a subsequent hearing that “I simply did not understand that orders on the emergency docket were precedent.”
‘Who Pays?’
Solicitor General D. John Sauer faced a tough hearing in November defending President Trump’s global tariffs, relying heavily on the 1981 opinion in Dames & Moore v. Reagan on frozen Iranian assets.
But that case, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “certainly did not concern tariffs.” And he appeared equally unconvinced by Sauer’s attempts to reframe the tariffs as something other than a tax.
“Well, who pays the tariffs?” Roberts asked bluntly.
Roberts is a key vote on a Supreme Court that has largely sided with Trump in disputes over executive authority but appeared to have significant skepticism about his power over tariffs. The court is expected to rule as early as January in the case.
Blatt Spat
A heated exchange between Gorsuch and litigator Lisa Blatt drew attention in April.
Blatt, of Williams & Connolly, accused attorneys representing an epileptic student of “lying” about her position in a Minnesota school dispute.
The comment drew condemnation from the court, with Gorsuch admonishing Blatt she should be “more careful with your words.”
Gorsuch later returned to the comment, saying he was still “troubled by it.”
“OK, let’s pull it up,” Blatt responded.
“Yeah, I think we’re going to have to here,” Gorsuch said.
After a testy back-and-forth, Blatt withdrew the remark. The incident prompted commentary on the legal sphere of social media, with one veteran litigator saying he’d never seen Gorsuch so angry.
Textualism’s ‘Founding Father’
Justice Antonin Scalia’s influence on the conservative-dominated Supreme Court was on full display in November as the justices considered a case centered around a bombing at a US military base in Afghanistan and an injured US soldier’s lawsuit against a government contractor that employed the Afghan national who detonated the explosive.
A central issue in the case is a 1988 opinion authored by Scalia in Boyle v United Technologies Corp. That ruling concluded that a defense contractor was immune from a suit claiming that a defective helicopter design was responsible for a US Marine pilot’s death.
Lawyers for the solider, Winston Hencely, argued that Boyle shouldn’t shield contractors like Fluor. In a brief submitted to the court, they also claimed Boyle requires judges to engage in an inquiry “unmoored from statutory text, and that ‘cannot support preemption.’”
But Justice Samuel Alito appeared unconvinced as he questioned Hencely’s attorney, Frank Chang, during oral arguments.
“I mean, what I took from your brief is you’re saying Boyle’s inconsistent with textualism,” said Alito, who served with Scalia for about 10 years. “Who wrote Boyle?”
“Justice Scalia wrote it,” said Chang, a lawyer at Consovoy McCarthy.
“I mean, so you’re saying the Founding Father of textualism doesn’t understand textualism,” Alito responded.
The retort prompted Chang to say that’s “not what I’m saying at all,” with Alito then adding, “Well, that’s what I took.”
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