This is Beyond a Reasonable Doubt with Your Hosts.

Mark Garagas and Gary Smith.

Welcome to Reasonable Doubt.

We have a very special guest and it's a fascinating subject, at least the legal nerds

like me.

This is Professor Stephen Vladek who is joining us.

Where are you today or is that a location undetermined?

I'm in Northern California.

We have an event tonight about the book at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

Speaking of the book, it's entitled The Shadow Docket, how the Supreme Court uses stealth

rulings to amass power and undermine the Republic.

I saw you the other night and I said, I want to talk with this guy as I'm such a geek

that this area of the law just fascinates me.

Most recently, and we maybe start there, the Gorsuch-Aid Pay Jorder on COVID and that

was with the title 42, talk about, well, I'll let you talk, but I just find it fascinating

that there's this whole area of the law that's going on that very few people understand

and maybe you could explain it because you've written an excellent book about it.

Thanks, Mark.

So the short version and the Gorsuch statement is a good example of this is that in back

in 2015, a Chicago law professor named Will Bowde who, close for John Roberts, who's a conservative,

had come up with this idea of naming the sort of boring technical side of the Supreme

Court's docket, the shadow docket.

...