MONTEREY, Calif. — Justice Elena Kagan said Thursday that the Supreme Court was shortchanging the public and lower court judges by failing to explain its reasoning in rulings on cases that come before the court on an emergency basis, including challenges to the Trump administration's efforts to transform the federal government.

"I think as we have done more and more on this emergency docket, there becomes a real responsibility that I think we didn't recognize when we first started down this road, to explain things better," Kagan said. "I think that we should hold ourselves, sort of on both sides, to a standard of explaining why we're doing what we're doing." Even two or three pages of explanation, she said, would be helpful — "to just sort of say, Here's the basic issue, the basic problem

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