Hello friends, welcome. I have a treat for you today. If you want to hear me get full

governor today is the day. I'm chatting with Steve Floddick who is a law professor at

the University of Texas and he has a book called The Shadow Docket. And this is about the

Supreme Court and their use of The Shadow Docket. We're going to get into what that means,

what it is, how it impacts all of us and maybe what we can do about it. So let's dive in.

I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting.

I'm really excited to be joined today by Steve Floddick. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. This is a real treat.

Of course, I love the Supreme Court and I read your book with interest and it is a book about

the Supreme Court's Shadow Docket. So much to talk about, so much to get into. I would love for

you to start by giving people just a little bit of your professional background so they have a

basis for understanding how you even came to write a book about the Shadow Docket and then we'll

get into it. So I'm, as I said, a law professor at the University of Texas in Austin, hook him.

I've been teaching for 17 years and my, you know, my real areas of expertise are nerdy questions

of federal legal procedure and sort of the structure of the federal court system and, of course,

the Supreme Court figures prominently in all of that. And I've been lucky, you know, as I've been

teaching and writing about the Supreme Court. I've also had a couple of opportunities to practice

before the Supreme Court. But, you know, Sharon, for me, my interest in the Supreme Court has always

been sort of drawn to the more technical side of what the court does, partly because I'm a

proceduralist at heart, like I'm interested in how systems work and not just the bottom lines

that they produce. And partly because I think there's actually a lot of stuff buried in the

procedure that actually is really important. And it's really a big part of what impelled me to

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