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The Supreme Court’s unrelenting abuse of its shadow docket has left lower courts scrambling to figure out what, exactly, is “law” on any given day. Time and again, the conservative supermajority has altered or overturned precedent—usually in Donald Trump’s favor —without bothering to explain why . In the process, it keeps disrupting carefully reasoned injunctions, sowing uncertainty over what rights and rules actually apply. This vacuum has left lower-court judges with an unenviable choice: Apply the law as it actually stands today or try to guess how the Supreme Court will change it tomorrow.

On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, Mark Joseph Ster

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