Elena Kagan Rings The Alarm On This 1 SCOTUS Practice

The liberal justice said the court has “a real responsibility that I think we didn’t recognize when we first started down this road.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on Thursday warned that the court should exercise caution when deciding cases on an emergency basis, as the body has handed the Trump administration several wins without providing Americans an explanation for its decisions.

In recent weeks, the high court said the president could fire the three Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission who were removed by Trump and then reinstated in their positions by a federal judge. It also allowed the administration to dismantle the Department of Education. The court did not explain its rationale for any of the two decisions, as is customary, since both were emergency appeals.

In an appearance at the 2025 Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference in Monterey, California, Kagan said justices “should be cautious about acting on the emergency docket.”

“Courts are supposed to explain things,” she said. “I think as we have done more and more on this emergency docket, there becomes a real responsibility that I think we didn’t recognize when we first started down this road, to explain things better.”

Cases on the emergency docket “are handled on an expedited basis with limited briefing and typically no oral argument, and the court often resolves them in unsigned orders with little or no explanation,” SCOTUSblog explains.