Bonus 91: A Tale of Four Emergencies

Three weeks into their summer recess, the justices are confronting four significant emergency requests. Even though the cases have nothing to do with each other, their confluence is no coincidence.

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I’m taking a short break from continuing coverage of the Court’s major “end-of-term” rulings in argued cases because, well, the term isn’t over. The justices now have before them four different major requests for some form of emergency relief, each of which have at least political—if not legal—significance. Those requests are not just important in their own right; as I explain below the fold, they also reinforce the extent to which these kinds of emergency requests are going to continue being a “normal” (and, in my view, problematic) weight on the rest of the Court’s workload until and unless the justices meaningfully grapple with how we got here—and the extent to which they bear at least some of the responsibility both for creating this mess and for charting a way out of it.

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