New York Times obtains 2016 exchanges between Supreme Court justices on quick rulings

The Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” was once a sleepy procedural backwater—used for last-minute technical rulings, often in death penalty cases, and typically without much attention.

But according to a New York Times deep dive into internal court memos, that began to change over the course of five days in 2016, when the justices took the unusual step of blocking an Obama-era climate rule before lower courts had finished weighing in.

Behind the scenes, the documents show, the move was anything but routine—an early signal that the court was willing to act faster, and more aggressively, than tradition might suggest.