Chief Justice John Roberts was the driving force behind the rise of the Supreme Court’s emergency docket as a powerful tool to empower the activist conservative majority — that’s the main takeaway of a cache of memos leaked to the New York Times. Roberts’ immediate motivation was to enforce the major questions doctrine, another tool of conservative activism that he has made his signature contribution to the court’s jurisprudence. In retrospect, the convergence between the emergency docket and the major questions doctrine was no coincidence. Taken together, the docket and the doctrine will define the legacy of the Roberts Court.
It ...