'Somebody is going to die,' judge warns SCOTUS
Supreme Court watchers react to an extraordinary NBC News report that 10 federal judges spoke out about the risks of shadow docket orders.
Don’t just find out what happened.
Appreciate the significance of the breaking news with detailed, accessible explanations.
In an investigative report that rocked the legal community, NBC News landed interviews with a dozen federal judges about the Supreme Court’s record of pausing lower court rulings against Donald Trump without explanation on an emergency basis.
At least 10 judges denounced the practice, with some warning that the Supreme Court’s unexplained rulings risked validating Trump’s attacks against judges that have sparked a wave of threats from his supporters.
One judge expressed concerns that "somebody is going to die” absent efforts to address the situation.
In an interview with All Rise News on the
’s Legal AF, University of Michigan law professor explains why the article was so extraordinary and what it says about the Supreme Court and Trump’s attacks on the judiciary.Click on the image below to watch the full video:
Federal judges rarely grant interviews to reporters, and on those infrequent occasions, it’s even more unusual for them to deliver pointed criticism of the Supreme Court for quotation.
“It's so rare for federal judges to actually talk to the press,” Litman noted in an interview. “The fact that they got so many federal judges to talk to them itself is significant.”
(For perspective: I have interviewed five sitting judges, including four federal judges, in nearly two decades on the legal beat. That number may be unusually high among my peers.)
NBC News reporter Lawrence Hurley landed interviews with 12 judges “appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, including Trump, and serving around the country,” according to the article.
For Litman, their willingness to speak out in such large numbers, even anonymously, points to the gravity of the situation.
“I've never seen anything close to this, and I want people to take away from this not that the lower federal courts are doing something untoward,” Litman said. “Instead, the message to take from this is how severe and serious the problem with the Supreme Court — and what they are doing vis-a-vis the lower federal courts — is that these judges felt the need and willingness to speak up about it publicly.”
The trend that provoked the lower court judges’ outcry has been the talk of the legal community: The Supreme Court keeps pausing adverse rulings against Trump on the so-called shadow docket, often without any written explanation.
Trump has prevailed in 17 of 23 requests for emergency high court intervention, according to the network’s calculations. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch criticized lower court judges for supposedly defying their orders, but some federal judges have responded that the justices are providing no guidance about what rules they are supposed to obey.
These unexplained rebukes fall at a time when Trump routinely attacks lower court judges who rule against him by name, and many of them are receiving threats from his supporters, including a threatening voicemail to U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. following his ruling blocking Trump’s freeze of federal aid.
The judges are not only speaking anonymously.
On July 31, four federal judges spoke publicly about the threats they have been facing in an extraordinary press conference featuring U.S. District Judges John Coughenour, Robert Lasnick, and McConnell. The same conference also featured U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, whose son Daniel was murdered in a 2020 attack on her home.
Judges have reported receiving pizza deliveries at their home in Daniel’s name, in veiled death threats communicating that the sender knows where the judges live. The incidents have become so routine that they now have a shorthand: “pizza doxxings.”
Professor Litman, a Supreme Court scholar and author of the book “Lawless,” unpacks recent trends about the emergency docket, threats against federal judges, and more in the video above.
Lying here in the darkness, I hear the sirens wail
Somebody going to emergency, somebody's going to jail