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The court’s brief order did not suspend the program in the meantime or add the case to the court’s merits docket.

After all, to a greater extent than has been true in generations, the merits docket is providing plenty of fodder all by itself.

But what happens on the merits docket is possible only because of the evolution of the shadow docket—especially the power the justices have claimed to decide not only which cases they’ll resolve, but which questions they’ll resolve within those cases.

Indeed, almost 10 months before the justices would use the merits docket to controversially repudiate the constitutional right to a pre-viability abortion that the court had recognized in Roe v.

That is to say, the merits docket exists in the shadows of the shadow docket, not the other way around.