Justice Sonia Sotomayor said a surge in emergency appeals to the Supreme Court is largely the court’s own doing.
“We’ve done it to ourselves,” she said during an April 9 event at the University of Alabama School of Law.
She said that the volume of emergency filings has reached levels never seen before in the court’s history.
Over the past 15 months, the Trump administration submitted about 30 emergency requests to the court, succeeding in more than 80 percent of them.
Many of those rulings divided the justices along ideological lines, with 6–3 outcomes.
Sotomayor, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009, suggested those wins reflect a shift among some of her colleagues, who now tend to assume that blocking federal policies automatically causes irreparable harm—grounds for the court to intervene….