Federal judges are not elected by the public. Nor are they supposed to make decisions based on their ideological preferences. Our political system instead vests them with the power to decide whether the president, Congress and other lawmakers are enacting policies that are consistent with previous laws, court rulings and, above all, the Constitution.

For these reasons, the credibility of judges depends on their ability to offer public explanation for the legal basis of their decisions. When judges show their work, the public can assess it by the standards the judiciary sets for itself — reasoning grounded in law and judicial precedent. Without that, judges risk their legitimacy. Clear explanation is especially important for the Supreme Court, which sets national rules that lower courts must follow. When the court fails to make these rules clear, confusion can set in.

The current Supreme Court is creating precisely this problem by issuing many important rulings as brief, unsigned orders on its so-called emergency docket. On this docket (also known as the shadow docket), the votes among the nine justices are not public, and the majorities typically offer little explanation for their decisions. Yet the justices have used the emergency docket this year to hand down a series of rulings allowing President Trump to expand executive power and alter the structure of government.

In following this path, the justices are ducking one of their crucial responsibilities: making persuasive arguments with which we can all engage. This overuse of the emergency docket is a self-inflicted wound. It diminishes public confidence in government when that confidence is already low.

We recognize that the emergency docket is a necessary part of Supreme Court business. It allows the court to address urgent questions that cannot wait months or years to be adjudicated to the end in the lower courts and then fully briefed and argued at the Supreme Court.

For most of American history, a single justice ruled on emergency matters, sometimes after a hearing, with each of the nine justices having authority over a different region. After the court reinstituted the death penalty in 1976, all nine heard last-minute applications to delay executions. The practice of the full court hearing emergency cases became routine in the early 1980s, according to Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor who tracks the court in a weekly newsletter. Still, the death penalty was long the emergency docket’s primary purpose. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, combined, asked the Supreme Court for emergency relief only eight times in 16 years.

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