"At 11:34 PM on April 9, 2021, the Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling. California governor Gavin Newsom's bid to enact enhanced COVID restrictions was overturned in a sweeping redefinition of existing law. The shadowy circumstances of this ruling--an unsigned decision made in just a few pages, without a full briefing, and in the middle of the night--are not typical of the Supreme Court. But, as legal scholar and expert Stephen Vladeck shows, they're becoming far too common. The Supreme Court has always had the authority to issue emergency rulings--halting an execution or preventing a law from going into effect until lower courts could rule on its constitutionality--but until recently, it did so only in exceptional circumstances and issued only narrow rulings. Yet in the past decade, the court has expanded its use of the behind-the-scenes "shadow docket" dramatically, handing down major decisions that impact millions of Americans without oral argument or signed opinions, and often