It’s been less than three weeks since the Supreme Court’s 2026-27 term officially started, so the first opinion day is likely still months away. But if you navigate to the page on the court’s website where this term’s opinions in argued cases eventually will be displayed – you know, the one that you maniacally refresh on opinion days beginning at 10 a.m. ET – you’ll notice that an opinion is already waiting for you there.
That opinion, FCC v. Brown, concerns the court’s grant of an emergency request from the Federal Communications Commission to block a lower court order requiring the FCC to decide quickly on a challenge to its “public notice” extending favorable advertising rates to political parties and joint fundraising committees. It’s unsigned and only five pages long, but that makes it about four-and-a-half pages longer than many of the court’s interim, or emergency, docket decisions.
The court’s typical brevity in such orders has long been a topic of debate, with some commentators – and even some justices – criticizing these short, unexplained decisions. Others have claimed that the court needs to be careful about what it puts into writing and that it won’t be able to quickly respond to what the applicants themselves often describe as emergencies if the justices are expected – or required – to provide fully reasoned opinions.
President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 kicked this debate into hyperdrive, as his administration has asked for such relief around three dozen times in disputes addressing such issues as immigration, funding cuts, and mail-in voting.
Perhaps out of a desire to turn down the volume of this intensifying debate, the Supreme Court has issued several (comparatively) more substantial opinions in interim docket cases since late August. And that’s where the “Opinions of the Court” page comes in. As interim docket decisions have gotten longer, they’ve increasingly appeared on this page, which is associated with formal opinions in argued cases.
Although this move toward more writing may be welcome, the corresponding website shift may not be, as it further complicates the court’s already complex approach to sharing interim docket decisions. You see, although the Supreme Court’s work is often discussed in terms of two dockets – the oral argument docket and the interim or emergency docket – supremecourt.gov is not organized along these lines. While opinions in argued cases all appear on the “Opinions of the Court” page, interim docket decisions now appear in one of three places, with their location depending on how much writing has been done and who was doing that writing.
Let me (try to) explain all that, and why it matters.
Opinions of the Court
As noted above, more substantial interim docket decisions, like FCC v. Brown, appear on the “Opinions of the Court” page, where the court also releases opinions in argued cases, summary reversals – that is, decisions on the merits made in response to a petition without additional briefing or argument – and orders dismissing an argued case without deciding it. You can access this page by hovering over the “Opinions” subhead at the top of supremecourt.gov and then clicking on “Opinions of the Court.”
Once you’re on this page, you can navigate to past terms by clicking on the years associated with them. For example, if you click on “2025,” you’ll see opinions of the court from the recently concluded 2025-26 term, also known as October Term 2025. Here, you’ll find West Virginia v. B.P.J., National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, and Trump v. Barbara – the three rulings handed down on the final opinion day of the 2025-26 term. But above these are five opinions in interim docket cases from the past two months, including the White House ballroom battle and the third iteration of the dispute over congressional redistricting in Missouri.
Even if you didn’t recognize the case names, you could determine that they came from the interim docket by looking at the “Docket” column. Interim docket cases have an “A” in the middle of their docket number, like 26A388, while nearly all cases on the oral argument docket have a hyphen, like 24-43. The “A” signifies that the case came to the court as an “application” for relief (often to pause a lower court decision) rather than as a petition for review that has been granted through the typical certiorari process (which would earn the case a dash).
But because nothing is simple with the Supreme Court, there are exceptions. One is interim docket applications that are taken up for argument, like Trump v. Cook (25A312), in which the court held that Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, could remain in her job while her challenge to Trump’s attempt to fire her moves forward. You can identify this (rare) type of case by checking the “J.” (for justice) column. Argued cases are almost always decided with a majority opinion written by a single justice, while cases that aren’t argued are typically resolved with unsigned, per curiam (Latin for “by the court,” rather than any particular justice) opinions. And so, cases like Trump v. Cook have both an “A” in the “Docket” column and a justice’s initials (rather than “PC”) in the “Justice” column.
Opinions Relating to Orders
Before the recent uptick in per curiam decisions on the interim docket, most decisions on high-profile emergency applications, including from the Trump administration, were instead shared on a page called “Opinions Relating to Orders.” To access this page, hover over the “Opinions” subhead and then click “Opinions Relating to Orders.”
Interim docket decisions generally appear here when the majority offers only a brief explanation for its grant or denial of relief, but the explanation is accompanied by longer opinions – whether concurrences or dissents or both – from individual justices. (These separate writings are the “opinions relating to orders” to which the title of the page refers.) Since January 2025, many of the court’s actions on Trump-related applications have been published on this page because they involved only a brief order and at least one separate writing – often a dissenting opinion from one of the court’s three Democratic appointees.
For example, when the court on Sept. 14 in U.S. Postal Service v. California declined to allow the U.S. Postal Service to carry out parts of its new rule on mail-in voting – which would have required states to, among other things, use specific envelopes for ballots – the court’s order was just three sentences long. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a short concurring opinion, and Justice Samuel Alito wrote an eight-page dissent, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. These separate writings are both listed on the “Opinions Relating to Orders” page for the 2025-26 term, and the court’s order does not appear elsewhere on the Supreme Court’s website (besides on the case page).
In addition to these types of interim docket decisions, the “Opinions Relating to Orders” page includes separate writings addressing capital cases and denied petitions, such as Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s statement from Monday’s order list. In the statement, which was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, Sotomayor addressed the court’s denial of review in O’Donnell v. City of Chicago, a challenge to Chicago’s policy of seizing and selling cars owned by drivers with as few as two unpaid parking tickets.
Orders of the Court
Speaking of order lists, the third place that interim docket decisions may appear on the Supreme Court’s website is the same place where order lists are available – the “Orders of the Court” page, which is accessed by hovering over the “Case Documents” subhead on the homepage and clicking on “Orders of the Court.”
Unlike the two pages discussed above, the entries on the “Orders of the Court” page do not include a case name. Instead, they are labeled either “Order List” or “Miscellaneous Order.”
Order lists are, well, lists of orders from the justices’ private conferences. They typically come on Monday mornings following Friday conferences, and the court generally schedules their release in advance, sharing the release time (usually 9:30 a.m.) on its calendar.
Miscellaneous orders, on the other hand, may be one of several things, including, but not limited to, orders in capital cases, orders from a single justice in interim docket cases, and orders from the full court in interim docket cases. (Some of the entries in this third category are orders with noted – but unexplained – dissents.) When Chief Justice John Roberts in FCC v. Brown temporarily put the lower court ruling on hold while the full court considered the dispute, his order granting an administrative stay appeared on the “Orders of the Court” page.
What unites these miscellaneous orders is that they include no explanation from the justices. The court (or an individual justice) states what it has done, but not why it is doing it. For example, the court’s response in capital cases is almost always “The application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented to [one justice] and by [him/her] referred to the Court is denied.”
The evolving interim docket
So why does this all matter? Besides being catnip for Supreme Court nerds, it deals with an important aspect of the interim docket and the lack of explanation in related decisions.
When Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett testified before Congress in July, they fielded several questions about just that. In response to one such query, Kagan highlighted the court’s recent effort to reduce confusion, noting that it was writing more these days. In the past, she said, there were cases “where we did so little explanation of what lay behind our order that lower courts had a great deal of difficulty trying to figure out what that order was. … I don’t think that that’s so much a problem anymore.”
What Kagan didn’t say (because, let’s be honest, why would she) is that the evolution of the interim docket can be traced across the Supreme Court’s website, and specifically, on the “Opinions of the Court” page, where decisions from this docket now increasingly appear. All told, seven opinions in interim docket cases that weren’t argued – five from August and September (discussed above) and two from earlier this year – appear on the “Opinions of the Court” page for last term. By comparison, only three such opinions appear on the “Opinions of the Court” page for the 2024-25 term and just one on the page for the 2023-24 term.
Less than a month into the 2026-27 term, the “Opinions of the Court” page for the current term already has one opinion addressing an interim docket case. We’ll see if several more such opinions appear on this page by this time next year. But even if that happens, it feels safe to predict that the debate over the court’s explanation for its interim docket decisions will persist, because lengthy explanations remain the exception, not the rule, on this docket, even if they’re becoming more common.
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