Beyond the Valley of the Shadow Docket
“In the end the shadow is only a small and passing thing;
there is light and high beauty forever beyond its reach,”
Samwise Gamgee said in Lord of the Rings,
and there’s eternity in a kiss upon the beach.
I will always dwell beyond Valley of the Shadow,
as David said in number twenty-three of his great Psalms,
paying no attention to what valleys may foreshadow,
concentrating just on Gilead and its great balms.
Walking in a shadow, similar, of the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket,
Donald Trump depends on its dark unexplained decisions, his mega-missiles’ rocket.
Recalling this poem on 7/15/25, I realized that President Trump walks in the “shadow of the shadow docket,” after reading, in Adam Liptak’s article ‘Supreme Court Keeps Ruling in Trump’s Favor, but Doesn’t Say Why,” NYT, 7/16/25:
The question of whether the nation’s highest court owes the public an explanation for its actions has grown along with the rise of the “emergency docket,” which uses truncated procedures to produce terse provisional orders meant to remain in effect only while the courts consider the lawfulness of the challenged actions. In practice, the orders often effectively resolve the case.
The court has allowed the administration to fire tens of thousands of government workers, discharge transgender troops, end protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants from war-torn countries and fundamentally shift power from Congress to the president — often with scant or no explanation of how it arrived at those results.
In the last 10 weeks alone, the court has granted emergency relief to the Trump administration without explanation seven times, according to a tally by Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown and the author of a book about the court’s emergency work called “The Shadow Docket.” (In that time, the court issued roughly the same number of emergency orders in which the majority gave at least a bit of explanation.
Monday’s ruling, Professor Vladeck wrote this week in his newsletter, was the latest “completely unexplained” ruling “that is going to have massive real-world effects long before the justices ever confront whether what the government is doing is actually lawful.