U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on Thursday warned that the court should exercise caution when deciding cases on an emergency basis, as the body has handed the Trump administration several wins without providing Americans an explanation for its decisions.
In recent weeks, the high court said the president could fire the three Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission who were removed by Trump and then reinstated in their positions by a federal judge. It also allowed the administration to dismantle the Department of Education. The court did not explain its rationale for any of the two decisions, as is customary, since both were emergency appeals.
In an appearance at the 2025 Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference in Monterey, California, Kagan said justices “should be cautious about acting on the emergency docket.”
“Courts are supposed to explain things,” she said. “I think as we have done more and more on this emergency docket, there becomes a real responsibility that I think we didn’t recognize when we first started down this road, to explain things better.”
Cases on the emergency docket “are handled on an expedited basis with limited briefing and typically no oral argument, and the court often resolves them in unsigned orders with little or no explanation,” SCOTUSblog explains.
Separately, Kagan also referred to the blowback the court has received in recent years over controversial decisions it’s made, citing the attacks her conservative colleagues faced in the summer of 2022 when the court chose to undo Roe v. Wade, a decades-old precedent that protected abortion rights.
“Some of my colleagues, my colleagues on the majority side, were confronted with protests outside their houses, including houses with children in them, and a gunman appeared at one of my colleagues’ houses, and that is scary stuff,” she said. “I think now there are a number of judges, sort of all up and down the judicial hierarchy, that are being confronted with the same.”
The liberal justice also took issue with the idea that government officials are not required to obey court orders against them, noting that judicial orders should be respected, without making any reference to Trump, who has repeatedly lashed out at judges who’ve ruled against his administration.
Kagan encouraged judges to maintain composure and continue doing their jobs “in the best way they know how,” despite efforts to subvert the rule of law.
“The response to perceived lawlessness of any kind is law,” Kagan said. “The way an independent judiciary should counter assaults on an independent judiciary is to act in the sorts of ways that judges are required to act.”
Kagan also conceded that there is “some disagreement on the court,” acknowledging that she has been in the minority with her two fellow liberal colleagues, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“I don’t enjoy that,” Kagan said. “I find it frustrating. I find it disappointing, I find it sometimes even maddening.”