In the shadows: Supreme Court’s offstage moves may matter more

In a matter of hours last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a citizenship question from next year’s census and blocked federal courts from hearing challenges to extreme partisan gerrymandering.

Twenty-four hours later, as the reactions continued to pour in, the court made the quiet, but equally seismic, decision to hear a case about President Donald Trump’s decision to end an Obama-era program protecting hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were brought illegally to the United States as children.

That case concerning the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, likely one of the biggest cases the court decides next year, was also one of the headline features of the court’s “shadow docket.”

Definitions of the shadow docket vary, but it essentially encompasses every decision the justices make that doesn’t receive a merits-based oral argument. These decisions can range from declining to hear a case to staying (or declining to stay) the execution of a death row inmate. Due in part to the fact the justices often debate and decide them behind closed doors, they rarely receive the widespread attention that major decisions do.

That hasn’t been quite the case this past term…

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