Ketanji Brown Jackson used a public address at Yale Law School to sharply criticize the Supreme Court's recent use of emergency orders, saying the orders read like "scratch-paper musings" and often lack real-world sensitivity.
She said the court's emergency rulings frequently present "back-of-the-envelope, first-blush impressions of the merits of the legal issue" and then require lower courts to apply those impressions.
Jackson warned that the orders can "seem oblivious and thus ring hollow" because they fail to acknowledge the people affected by the policies, and she challenged the notion that stopping a president's policy is itself a harm when the policy appears illegal.
As reported by AP, Jackson reviewed roughly two dozen court orders issued last year that allowed President Donald Trump to implement controversial policies on immigration and steep federal funding cuts after lower courts found those policies likely illegal.
The justice spoke for nearly an hour, and Yale Law School posted video of the event, which included a question and answer session with law dean Cristina Rodriguez where Jackson said "the president of the United States, though he may be harmed in an abstract way, he certainly isn't harmed if what he wants to do is illegal."
Reactions And Court Dynamics
Jackson said the court used to be reluctant to resolve disputes at early stages and that "there is value in avoiding having the court continually touching the third rail of every divisive policy issue in American life," a change she could not fully explain.
She said conversations among the justices have occurred, yet she chose to speak publicly to be "a catalyst for change," and she has registered similar objections in written dissents and in a recent public appearance with Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor addressed related concerns in recent public remarks and on the same day issued a rare apology to Justice Kavanaugh for "hurtful comments" she made at another law school, a remark that Bloomberg Law reported referenced a Kavanaugh opinion in an immigration case.
Jackson often aligns with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in dissenting from emergency orders, and she said the court has been "noticeably less restrained" in recent years when handling applications that involve controversial matters.
