Brett Kavanaugh leads the Supreme Court’s embrace of alternative facts.

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As the Supreme Court begins a new term this month, much attention is being paid to the many recent shadow-docket rulings in which the justices have issued summary orders reversing trial courts. These typically involve little or no explanation. They also have a distinctly partisan cast, given the administration’s woeful record before the lower courts and relative success at the Supreme Court.

But from the internal perspective of the law, it is striking that many of these early-stage orders have either reversed or supplanted factual findings of lower courts. Whatever one thinks about the case outcomes, this is a stark departure from the fundamental legal norms tha