Taraleigh Davis
Dr. Taraleigh Davis is an Assistant Professor of Public Law and American Politics at Bradley University. She studies U.S. Supreme Court decision-making with a focus on emergency applications and their impact on policy and public opinion. She is author of the forthcoming book from UVA Press, “For Immediate Review: The Emergency Docket and the U.S. Supreme Court” (Spring 2027).
What really happens on the emergency docket
By now, readers of SCOTUSblog are quite familiar with the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, where parties come to the court seeking emergency orders, oftentimes without full briefing and oral argument. Much of the discourse surrounding this docket centers on its opacity.
Introducing the Interim Relief Docket Stat Pack
For years, scholars and commentators have tracked the Supreme Court’s merits docket through detailed statistical analyses. SCOTUSblog’s Stat Pack has become an essential resource for understanding how the justices decide cases after full briefing and oral argument.
Is the emergency docket really for emergencies?
If you’re requesting emergency relief from the Supreme Court, how long should you expect to wait for a decision? In other words, does the court really treat emergency applications as emergencies? The answer, it turns out, depends on what kind of emergency you have.
What the emergency docket actually looks like
By now, you’ve probably heard a great deal about the Supreme Court’s interim relief docket, also known as the emergency or “shadow” docket – which, although it technically refers to all cases that are not briefed and argued on the merits, is commonly used to describe the cases in which a party comes to the court for an order on an emergency basis without full briefing and oral argument.