Adam Liptak
speaker
322 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 30 Apr
Adam Liptak’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
and by extension, our institutional legitimacy, a nullity.
So not only is it dawning on them that there's a real clash in the court, not only is it dawning on them that they're moving in a different direction, they're also portraying this thing, or at least Justice Alito is, as an almost existential threat to the court itself.
But that's what's so extraordinary about these papers.
They open a window on how the justices talk to each other, how frank they are, really, about their actual agendas.
And so they're quite different in kind.
from their ordinary decisions, which are a kind of mask that portray the court as confining itself to the facts, the relevant legal materials, and suggesting that they produce an inevitable legal result.
Whereas the justices are human beings,
And they live in the world, and they take account of a lot of stuff.
They don't say it in public, but it turns out they say it in private.
Critics of the shadow docket have always feared that the court can't do anything
its best work under this kind of time pressure without good briefing and arguments and deliberation.
And these memos vindicate that criticism.
This is not the court doing A-plus work.
This is the court throwing ideas around, seeming to be motivated by grievances against a
a president that some of the conservatives view as activist, getting snippy with each other, and just in general, not doing the kind of work we associate with the nation's highest court.
So people think the shadow docket is problematic because the court is moving too fast on not enough information.
And these memos support that criticism.
Mm-hmm.
And where it leads is what we've seen over the first year plus of the Trump administration, where the court is deluged by emergency applications and is spending seemingly half its time on them and is often, in very short periods of time, ruling for the Trump administration on major questions like immigration.
like agency power, like government spending, like transgender troops.
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