Earlier this year, SCOTUSblog published the first Interim Relief Docket Stat Pack, a statistical portrait of the Supreme Court’s interim/emergency/shadow docket for the 2024-25 term. Now that the 2025-26 term has concluded, Taraleigh Davis produced a second edition of this stat pack, which we released on Tuesday.
At the Court
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court released a list of orders from the justices’ private conference on Oct. 9, announcing, among other things, that it had added three new cases to the oral argument docket for the 2026-27 term. The cases include U.S. DOGE Service v. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, on what types of discovery orders are appropriate in disputes over access to government information. For more on Monday’s order list, see the Morning Reads and On Site sections below.
Also on Tuesday, the justices heard oral argument in Beaird v. United States, on the degree of deference that courts owe to the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s commentary on applying federal sentencing guidelines.
Today, the justices will hear argument in Salazar v. Paramount Global, on whether and how the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, which was enacted after the Washington City Paper reported on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental history, applies in the internet era.
On Sept. 28, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to clear the way for the Federal Bureau of Prisons to implement its new policy on healthcare and accommodations for transgender inmates, which would prevent such inmates from obtaining gender-transition surgeries, hormone therapy, and “social accommodations.” The dispute is now fully briefed, and the court’s decision could come at any time.
The court is currently weighing requests from the Federal Communications Commission and two Republican groups to block a ruling by a federal appeals court that would require the FCC to rule quickly on a challenge to its “public notice” extending favorable advertising rates to political parties and joint fundraising committees. These interim docket cases are also fully briefed.