The last decade has witnessed a significant increase in academic and journalistic interest in the United States Supreme Court’s shadow docket. Yet despite this increased interest, there exists no systematic database of the shadow docket. This paper summarizes the Supreme Court Shadow Docket Database, which we create by parsing the Journal of the Supreme Court from the 1993 through 2024 terms into individual orders. We categorize these orders into a set of usable categories, including cert denials, injunctions, summary reversals, mandamus petitions and grant, vacate, and remands. We illustrate some potential uses of the data by examining several interesting trends in the Court’s use of the shadow docket over time.

When deciding new issues, judges face uncertainty about how cases map into their existing understanding of the law. This uncertainty can lead to conflicting decisions on the same legal question, generating inconsistent law. I develop a formal theory of judicial decision making, where courts learn about and rule on new legal issues. I find that courts learn most from their ideological allies; however, increasing the ideological distance between courts can either increase or decrease legal uniformity. Using an original dataset of cases of first impression in the U.S. Courts of Appeals, I find that increasing the ideological distance between two courts increases the probability of disagreement if the previous court’s decision is in-line with their relative bias, and decreases disagreement when the decision runs counter to their relative bias. My findings highlight the ways that courts can use decisions from even ideologically distant peers to learn about new legal issues.

Appellate courts with discretionary dockets have multiple ways to review lower courts. We develop a formal model that evaluates the tradeoffs between “full review”—which features full briefing, oral arguments, and signed opinions—versus “quick review,” where a higher court can summarily reverse a lower court. We show that having the option of costless summary reversal can increase compliance by lower courts, but also distort their behavior compared to relying only on costly full review. When the higher court is uncertain about the lower court’s preferences, the threat of summary reversal can lead an aligned lower court to “pander” and issue the opposite disposition to that preferred by the higher court. Access to summary reversal can therefore harm the higher court in some circumstances. Our analysis provides a theoretical foundation for growing concern over the U.S. Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”—of which summarily reversals are a component—which has been empirically focused to date.

What influence do lobbyists have on the behavior of interest groups? When representing multiple clients, lobbyists must balance time and credibility constraints with the need to adequately represent each client. We argue that lobbyists resolve these competing incentives by targeting policies that benefit large subsets of their clients, at the cost of a more individualized legislative strategy. We test our theory using an original dataset of intergovernmental lobbying in California. We find high levels of similarity in lobbying behavior among municipalities represented by the same lobbying firm, even when accounting for differences in municipalities’ demographic, fiscal, and geographic characteristics. Using a stacked difference-in-differences design, we find that when these governments change lobbying firms, the structure of their lobbying behavior changes as well. Our findings highlight the role of lobbyists in structuring their clients’ actions and the principal-agent problems inherent in contract lobbying.