Sniping by justices underscores tension over Supreme Court’s ‘shadow docket’ | CNN Politics

The Supreme Court’s emergency docket has resurfaced as a flashpoint within the federal judiciary as justices openly snipe at one another over the handling of short-fuse appeals, especially those involving President Donald Trump’s policies. The renewed debate over what critics call the “shadow docket” has been at the center of several recent instances of tension between the justices spilling out into public view – including an unusually harsh broadside Justice Sonia Sotomayor leveled at a conservative colleague. Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal, issued a rare public apology on Wednesday for suggesting earlier that Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s privileged upbringing influenced his approach to an emergency immigration case last year. A day before her mea culpa, a newly posted video revealed that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had spent more than an hour lambasting the court’s conservative majority for its handling of quick turn cases. “Back then, the justices humbly waited,” Jackson, the court’s junior liberal, told Yale Law School as she drew a comparison between the modern court and how she said the justices dealt with emergency matters when she was a clerk two