Justice Chides SCOTUS Conservatives    04/16 06:14

   

   WASHINGTON (AP) -- Supreme CourtJustice Ketanji Brown Jackson has delivered 
a sustained attack on her conservative colleagues' use of emergency orders to 
benefit the Trump administration, calling the orders "scratch-paper musings" 
that can "seem oblivious and thus ring hollow."

   The court's newest justice, Jackson delivered a lengthy assessment of 
roughly two dozen court orders issued last year that allowed President Donald 
Trump to put in place controversial policies on immigration, steep federal 
funding cuts and other topics, after lower courts found they were likely 
illegal.

   While designed to be short-term, those orders have largely allowed Trump to 
move ahead -- for now -- with key parts of his sweeping agenda.

   Jackson spoke for nearly an hour on Monday at Yale Law School, which posted 
a video of the event on Wednesday.

   Last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor similarly talked about emergency orders 
in an event Tuesday at the University of Alabama that also took issue with the 
conservatives' approach.

   Jackson has previously criticized the emergency orders both in dissenting 
opinions and in an unusual appearance with Justice Brett Kavanaugh last month. 
But her talk at Yale, addressing the public rather than the other eight 
justices, was notable.

   She referred to orders, which often are issued with little or no explanation 
as "back-of-the-envelope, first-blush impressions of the merits of the legal 
issue."

   Worse still, she said, was that the court then insists that "those 
scratch-paper musings" be applied by lower courts in other cases.

   The orders suffer from an additional problem, she said, a failure to 
acknowledge that real people are involved, making them "seem oblivious and thus 
ring hollow."

   She also pushed back on the court's assessment that preventing the president 
from putting his policy in place also is a harm that often outweighs what the 
challengers to a policy might face.

   "The president of the United States, though he may be harmed in an abstract 
way, he certainly isn't harmed if what he wants to do is illegal," Jackson said 
during a question-and-answer session with law school dean Cristina Rodriguez.

   The court used to be reluctant to step into cases early in the legal 
process, she said. "There is value in avoiding having the court continually 
touching the third rail of every divisive policy issue in American life," 
Jackson said.

   While she said she couldn't explain the change, "in recent years, the 
Supreme Court has taken a decidedly different approach to addressing emergency 
stay applications. It has been noticeably less restrained, especially with 
respect to pending cases that involve controversial matters."

   Jackson, often joined by Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan, has frequently 
dissented.

   There have been conversations about emergency orders among the justices, 
Jackson said, but she decided to speak publicly with the goal of being "a 
catalyst for change."

   Also on Wednesday, Sotomayor issued a rare public apology to another 
justice, Kavanaugh, for what she termed "hurtful comments" she made last week 
during an appearance at the University of Kansas law school.

   Referencing an opinion Kavanaugh wrote in an immigration case where the 
court granted an emergency order sought by the administration, Sotomayor said 
her colleague "probably doesn't really know any person who works by the hour." 
Her remarks were reported by Bloomberg Law.