1. United States
2. Letter

Dear Chief Justice Roberts, You have cultivated a public reputation for care, caution, and institutional restraint. The American people deserve to know what the internal memos obtained by the New York Times reveal about the gap between that reputation and reality. In February 2016, you pushed to halt President Obama’s Clean Power Plan through the Supreme Court’s emergency docket — using the wrong legal standard, citing a BBC interview and an EPA blog post in place of a vetted legal record, dismissing colleagues who warned you were proposing an unprecedented move, and weighing no downsides and no alternatives. You wrote, yourself, “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical.” You proceeded anyway. That single paragraph — issued without oral arguments, without briefs, without a written opinion explaining the Court’s reasoning — was the birth of the modern shadow docket. In the decade since, the emergency docket you built has been used to deliver more than 20 major rulings in favor of the current administration, on issues ranging from immigration to agency authority, all decided in secret and at speed. The Court’s legitimacy rests entirely on public trust in its process. Secret rulings, issued without explanation, by justices accountable to no one, are not consistent with that trust. We are calling on you, as Chief Justice, to require written reasoning for all shadow docket rulings, adopt a binding and enforceable ethics code for all Supreme Court justices, and restore the deliberative process that two centuries of jurisprudence was built upon. You wrote that you recognized the posture was not typical. History will record whether you had the integrity to correct it.