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The 'Enormous Shift' That Explains Trump's Supreme Court Victories
11/14/2025
The 'Enormous Shift' That Explains Trump's Supreme Court Victories
On this week’s episode of Supreme Court Brief, host Jimmy Hoover discusses the court’s intervention in a battle over food stamp benefits, new briefing over President Donald Trump’s efforts to deploy the National Guard, and oral arguments in the case of a Rastafarian prisoner who was forcibly shaved by prison guards. This week's guest is law professor Carolyn Shapiro, who explains how the Supreme Court’s under-the-radar shift in emergency docket cases is leading to a string of victories for the Trump administration. Shapiro argues that the court has quietly adopted the presumption that the government experiences "irreparable harm" any time a new policy is blocked by a federal court, essentially removing a crucial factor that the justices had long required all litigants to meet before awarding emergency relief. "It seems more and more clear that that is what the majority on the Supreme Court thinks: that it is just simply, by definition, 'irreparable harm' when the government is told it can't do what it wants," said Shapiro, who co-leads the Supreme Court clinic at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. "That's never been the standard before." "It is extraordinarily important and it is an enormous shift that the court is not even owning up to," argued Shapiro, a former clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer and the former solicitor general of Illinois. "It's acting as if that's always been the law and that has never been the law." Host: Jimmy Hoover Guest: Carolyn Shapiro Producer: Charles Garnar
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