The Trump administration, however, abandoned this restraint, and they were rewarded for it. Bush and Obama Administrations, the Solicitor General filed a total of eight applications” asking the justices to block a lower court’s decision, “averaging one every other Term.” As University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck found in a 2019 paper, “during the sixteen years of the George W. Indeed, the Court’s reluctance to bypass its ordinary, very slow procedures was so well-known among Supreme Court practitioners that these lawyers were historically reluctant to even ask the justices for shadow docket relief. The Court, after all, has the final word on how to interpret US law, so if the justices moved too quickly, they risked handing down an erroneous decision that could not easily be corrected. Historically, the Supreme Court has been reluctant to weigh in on any case before it was fully litigated in the lower courts, and before the justices spent months considering the parties’ briefs and hearing oral arguments. The Court started issuing many shadow docket orders that benefited conservatives during the Trump administration Nevertheless, the Court’s brief order in the Naperville case is significant less because of what it says about the justices’ approach to gun policy than because it suggests that at least some key members of the Supreme Court have grown disillusioned with the Court’s once-very-frequent use of the shadow docket. The case will be heard by a federal appeals court in late June, and that court’s decision may be reviewed by the Supreme Court under its ordinary, less rushed process for hearing cases. (Notably, Brett Kavanaugh, the median justice on the current, very conservative Supreme Court, is a longtime proponent of legalizing assault weapons.) The most likely explanation for the Court’s latest order is that a majority of the justices believed that this case did not warrant this expedited treatment, not that a majority of the Court will ultimately vote to uphold assault rifle bans. City of Naperville, arose on the Court’s “ shadow docket,” a hodgepodge of emergency motions and other expedited matters that the Court sometimes decides without full briefing or oral argument. The case, known as National Association for Gun Rights v. That said, Wednesday’s order is only a very brief victory for proponents of gun regulation. Had these litigants prevailed in the nation’s highest court, such a decision could have invalidated assault rifle bans throughout the United States. The order denies relief to litigants challenging Illinois’s ban on semiautomatic assault weapons, and a similar ban enacted by the city of Naperville, Illinois, who had argued both violated the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court handed down a very brief order on Wednesday morning that offers gun regulation advocates a slightly surprising - but likely short-lived - victory.
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