Justice Sotomayor warned that the Supreme Court is getting slammed with emergency appeals, and the dispute over how the Court handles those quick decisions has exposed serious institutional tensions.

At the University of Alabama Law School, Justice Sonia Sotomayor described an “unprecedented” flood of emergency motions and said the Court has brought that pressure on itself. Her remarks put the spotlight on a debate over the so-called shadow docket and how quickly the justices should step in when lower courts halt federal policy.

The volume is striking: about 30 emergency applications filed by the Trump administration in the past 15 months and a reported grant rate over 80 percent. Emergency applications sit outside the merits docket and often come with no written opinion explaining the Court’s reasoning, which frustrates critics across the ideological spectrum.

Sotomayor was blunt in assigning responsibility. “The newspapers are filled with reports about how many emergency motions we are receiving. It’s unprecedented in the court’s history.”

She followed that with another sharp line: “We’ve done it to ourselves.”

Her point frames the fight as a philosophical split among the justices over when to intervene to protect federal statutes from lower-court injunctions. Conservative members of the Court, she suggested, see a single district judge enjoining federal law as inflicting 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 position is not a procedural sleight of hand. Conservatives argue a straightforward principle: when a district judge freezes a duly enacted federal statute nationwide, the government has standing to seek immediate relief. Whether you like the policy or not, the logic has legal force and explains why the Court has been intervening in politically charged disputes.

But the Republican critique goes a step further: the emergency pileup is a reaction to unprecedented lower-court activism. When individual district judges issue sweeping nationwide injunctions that halt policies for 330 million people, the affected party has little choice but to seek rapid review at the Supreme Court.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh has acknowledged the rising pace but warned about institutional risks from hasty opinions. “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 and serious. He is not urging the Court to ignore emergency filings; he is cautioning against binding the Court prematurely by issuing full written opinions before full briefing and argument.

Justice Elena Kagan has pushed the opposite institutional value: public explanation. “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 demand for transparency matters, but it also has consequences. Requiring full written explanations on every emergency application would slow the docket and make it harder for the government to get timely relief from sweeping lower-court orders, which may be the point for some critics.

The current term shows the Court is not monolithic despite its 6-3 conservative alignment. In a high-profile decision about presidential tariff authority, Justices Gorsuch and Barrett joined Chief Justice Roberts and the Court’s three liberal justices to reject a broad executive claim. That split underlines that conservative justices weigh institutional and legal limits, not loyalty to any administration.

The Court also decided 6-3 in Mahmoud v. Taylor, siding with parents who challenged a school district’s no-exceptions rule for LGBTQ-themed storytime opt-outs. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority said the parents were likely to succeed on their claim that the policy unconstitutionally burdened their religious exercise, and the Court ordered the district to notify parents and allow opt-outs.

Other consequential rulings this term include backing a counselor’s free speech challenge to a Colorado conversion therapy ban, a decision that sharpened the First Amendment profile of the docket. These merits rulings show the Court is engaging in core questions about government authority across a wide policy range.

Sotomayor’s line that “We’ve done it to ourselves” points at colleagues for answering emergency appeals, but it leaves out the trigger. The spike in emergency filings traces back to lower-court nationwide injunctions that halt federal policy immediately and broadly. If conservatives want fewer emergency filings, the simplest fix is fewer nationwide injunctions from district courts.

None of this makes the shadow docket immune to critique. Kavanaugh’s worry about premature lock-in is legitimate, and Kagan’s push for explanation is principled. But slowing emergency relief until lower-court judges can entrench their preferred policies without review would be a change that undermines the Court’s role in enforcing federal law.