Justice Jackson rebukes Supreme Court conservatives over Trump’s potentially ‘illegal’ actions

While Jackson’s very public chide of the high court is rare, the justice said she decided to speak out with the goal of being “a catalyst for change.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a rare rebuke of her conservative colleagues on the United States Supreme Court, arguing that some of the majority court’s rulings have allowed President Donald Trump to implement actions that are likely illegal.

While delivering a lecture at Yale Law School on Monday, the Supreme Court’s newest justice and first Black woman on the high court called out the conservative majority’s use of emergency orders, also known as the shadow docket. Jackson said the court’s current use of the emergency judicial powers has been “problematic.”

Since Trump returned to the White House for a second term, the Supreme Court has granted dozens of emergency relief requests for the Trump administration, allowing the president to enact controversial policies related to immigration, federal funding cuts already approved by Congress, and other actions that were found to likely be illegal by lower courts.

As the Associated Press reports, Jackson described the use of emergency orders, which are often issued with little or no explanation, as “back-of-the-envelope, first-blush impressions of the merits of the legal issue.” Jackson warned that the Supreme Court’s orders, while pending review, fail to acknowledge that real people are impacted by those decisions, making them “seem oblivious and thus ring hollow.”

During a question-and-answer portion of her visit to Yale, Justice Jackson also pushed back against the court’s assessment that preventing President Trump from implementing his policies is a harm that outweighs what the challengers to said policies might face. Without naming Trump directly, Jackson said, “The president of the United States, though he may be harmed in an abstract way, he certainly isn’t harmed if what he wants to do is illegal.”

Jackson noted that the Supreme Court used to be reluctant to get involved in cases early in the legal process, explaining, “There is value in avoiding having the court continually touching the third rail of every divisive policy issue in American life.”

While the Harvard Law graduate said she was unsure what had caused the court’s change over the years, she said the court — comprised of three justices appointed by Trump during his first term — has taken a “decidedly different approach to addressing emergency stay applications.” She added, “It has been noticeably less restrained, especially with respect to pending cases that involve controversial matters.”

While Jackson’s very public chide of the Supreme Court is rare, the justice said she decided to speak out with the goal of being “a catalyst for change.”