Merits Positions and Supreme Court Voting on Stays and Injunctions

Abstract This paper presents empirical evidence that Supreme Court voting on stays and injunctions is associated with justices’ expected preferences for resolving the merits. This result is especially pronounced when the merits remain pending before a lower court. Combined with a largely overlooked recent shift in the procedural context in which these applications arise, the latter finding helps explain increased decision salience and controversy. Emphasizing procedural context also sharpens inference about institutional performance, focuses normative proposals to enhance reason giving, and illustrates how undifferentiated conceptual labels such as shadow docket , emergency docket , and interim docket obscure important variation.