An Underwhelming Leak on the Supreme Court’s Emergency Docket

Over the weekend, Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak of the New York Times published another story based on leaks from the Supreme Court’s internal deliberations, this time from a 2016 decision on an application for an emergency stay. The leaks include 16 pages of internal memos that the Times published in full. The story was breathlessly hyped by the Times as “The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court,” with the teaser “The birth of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket has long been a mystery. Until now.”

The hype itself is both overwrought and aimed at the wrong target. But the leak is every bit as newsworthy as its contents.