Georgetown Law Professor Stephen I. Vladeck delivered ��������’s 2025 Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Lecture on March 24, 2025, where he built a case that the U.S. Supreme Court has never been more powerful—or more unaccountable. 

“This is a Court that’s spending a finite amount of institutional capital, and it’s running out,” Vladeck said. 

Framing his remarks around “the Court we have, the Court we had, and the Court we need,” Vladeck demonstrated how the Court has gradually cut itself off from the systems that once held it accountable. 

One result, he said, is the rise of the “shadow docket,” a term he helped popularize. Today’s Court hears fewer cases than at any point since 1864 but increasingly issues emergency rulings with major consequences. “Greenlighting executions, blocking immigration policy, reshaping election rules, without full briefing, without oral argument, often without explanation.” 

“We should be invested in bolstering the Court as an institution—so it can actually serve its role in our constitutional system.” 

That lack of transparency, he warned, is undermining public trust. He characterized the current Supreme Court as “a Court that’s doing less and less because of all the power it has accumulated, because it does what it wants,” he said. 

He pointed to the Court’s near-total control over its own process as both a symptom and a source of that power. “There’s no mandatory jurisdiction for the Supreme Court anymore,” he said. “They decide what they want to decide, when they want to decide it, how they want to decide it, and how much they want to tell us.” That discretion, he argued, allows the justices to take high-stakes cases, issue rulings with little explanation, and shield themselves from meaningful public scrutiny.