Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said it’s “absolutely a legitimate question” as to whether lower court judges should defy the Supreme Court and its decades of precedent when it comes to emergency docket decisions.
U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel of the District of South Carolina was interviewing Jackson at the American Law Institute earlier this month when he said: “I have found, as a district judge, it mystifying at times, where an emergency docket decision of maybe just two or three pages, appears to countermand longstanding Supreme Court precedent. Are we to apply the brief, the short stay decision, or denial of stay? Or are we to follow 50 years of precedent? It’s a perplexing thing to do.”
