Justice Kavanaugh defends crowded emergency docket, warns against releasing too many opinions

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Thursday night defended the high court's response to a massive flood of emergency appeals from the Trump administration, but cautioned his fellow justices against writing too much in accompanying opinions. 

The Supreme Court has seen a giant wave of challenges and emergency appeals on its emergency docket since President Donald Trump took office in January. The high court is currently on its annual summer break, but can still respond to emergency orders, which are not designed to be final rulings in most cases.

Kavanaugh, who was nominated to his life-long post by Trump in his first term, told a group of judges and lawyers at the judicial conference of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, that while the court should be reviewing the emergency cases, they were doing the right thing in keeping their explanations on the rulings short.

“We have written a lot more than we’ve written in the past on the interim orders docket,” Kavanaugh said, before warning of a "danger" in writing too much before a final ruling is determined.

"There can be a risk, in writing the opinion, of a lock-in effect, of making a snap judgment and putting it in writing, in a written opinion that’s not going to reflect the final view," he said. 

The observation is the opposite of liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan's, who claimed last week that the Supreme Court should do more to explain their rulings to avoid confusion, the New York Times reported.

“I think 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,” Kagan said. “I think that we should hold ourselves, sort of on both sides, to a standard of explaining why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

The Supreme Court is expected to return to its full schedule in October.

Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.