Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is urging her colleagues on the bench to be more transparent as they make more emergency decisions, including those involving President Trump.

At an event in California, Kagan criticized how the court has handled a flood of appeals from the Trump administration on their emergency docket.

The emergency docket, also known as the shadow docket, is a process the Supreme Court uses

for urgent cases that are decided quickly with no oral arguments.

As we have done more and more on this emergency docket, there becomes a real responsibility

that I think we didn't recognize when we first started down this road to explain things better.

I think that we should hold ourselves sort of on both sides to a standard of, you know,

explaining why we're doing what we're doing.

In the first six months of President Trump's second term, the conservatives on the court have sided with him on several key policies,

including allowing the administration to continue mass firings at multiple government agencies and to cancel certain federal grants.

But those decisions have come with little to no explanation for their rationale.

For more on all this, we're joined now by SCOTUS blog co-founder and NewsHour Supreme Court analyst Amy Howell. Always great to have you here. Thanks for having me. So before we get into the details of how the court is using this emergency docket, explain exactly what it is. So one way to think of it is to think about what it's not. And most people, when they think of the Supreme Court, think of the decisions,

like the decision on affirmative action or the decision on same-sex marriage in which the court

agrees that it's going to take the case. There's extensive briefing, usually over the course

of a couple of months. The court hears oral arguments in open court and then issues a decision

in open court. The justices read a summary. There's a,

there's a lot of news coverage. And the emergency docket or the shadow docket, as it's sometimes

called, happens outside of all that process. And as you mentioned, it often is a request from

the federal government, but it can be from private parties or from states,

for the Supreme Court to step in and do something quickly. And often it's to put a lower court

order on hold. And while the litigation in that dispute plays out. And that it can happen pretty

quickly. There's just usually a couple of briefs in the case.

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