Ketanji Brown Jackson's shadow docket dissents, counted

Last verified: August 27, 2026. Legal-background review: Mara Ellison. This analysis is provided for general informational purposes and is not legal advice.

The count on the record

The number readers usually want is 35. It is Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s total of publicly recorded dissenting votes in the shadow-docket study reported by Adam Feldman, whose wider dataset runs from October 2010 through May 2025.[1] That date range describes the dataset, not Jackson’s tenure; she joined the Court after the window had already begun.

The methodology warning belongs beside the number rather than in a footnote: 35 is a shadow-docket measure. It should not be described simply as “Jackson’s dissents,” added to a merits-docket tally, or treated as a count of every disagreement she may have had with an unsigned order. The available record captures public dissent, not undisclosed voting.

A rare event before it is a Jackson statistic

Feldman identified 387 public dissents among 93,832 non-merits dispositions in the October 2010–May 2025 window. By term, the share ranged roughly from 0.4% to 0.9%. It approached 0.89% in both the 2018-19 and 2023-24 terms, then stood at about 0.48% in 2024-25.[1]

Those percentages describe the proportion of non-merits dispositions associated with public dissent under the study’s rules. They are not the percentage of emergency applications granted, the share of closely divided orders, or an individual justice’s disagreement rate. The denominator includes a large volume of non-merits activity in which no public dissent appears.

That base rate changes how the 35 should be read. A few dozen recorded votes may look modest beside a merits-docket opinion count accumulated over several terms. Within a universe where well over 99% of the measured dispositions did not produce a public dissent, it is conspicuous.

The peer totals

For the same study window and measure, Feldman reported the following leading totals.[1]

Sotomayor’s total dominates the full period, while Thomas and Alito demonstrate that recorded opposition on non-merits matters is not confined to one ideological bloc. Jackson’s raw total is smaller, but it was accumulated during only the portion of the study window in which she served. The figures therefore locate her within the public dissent set; they do not furnish a tenure-adjusted ranking or an influence score.

Only 16 of the 387 public dissents—about 4%—were cross-ideological in Feldman’s classification.[1] That detail is more useful as a description of the dataset than as proof of polarization in every emergency matter. The measured set consists overwhelmingly of publicly expressed disagreements that did not cross the study’s ideological grouping, but it contains nothing close to a complete roll call for all 93,832 dispositions.

What the counting rule can and cannot see

A reproducible citation needs four labels: the source, the date window, the universe, and the counting unit. Here, the source is Feldman’s analysis using Kastellec–Taboni docket data; the window is October 2010 through May 2025; the universe is non-merits dispositions; and the Jackson numerator is publicly recorded dissenting votes attributed to her.[1]

“Public” does substantial work. Emergency orders may identify dissenting justices, append a written dissent, or otherwise disclose disagreement. Other orders reveal less. The Court’s handling of votes on the shadow docket does not consistently provide a complete justice-by-justice record, so an unlisted justice cannot safely be coded as affirmatively agreeing with the disposition.[2]

Silence can reflect agreement, acquiescence, a choice not to make disagreement public, recusal, or a procedural circumstance the order does not explain. The dataset measures none of those possibilities unless the public record identifies them. Calling the remaining orders “unanimous” would replace missing data with an assumption.

Nor is 93,832 an appropriate personal denominator for Jackson. She did not sit for the whole study period, and the universe is not a list of 93,832 documented opportunities on which her individual vote was reported. Dividing 35 by that figure would produce an arithmetic result, but not a valid Jackson-specific dissent rate.

What a visible dissent looks like

Primary orders make the observable boundary concrete. In Noem v. Doe, the published order records Jackson’s dissent and includes her written explanation.[3] The order in SSA v. AFSCME likewise makes her opposition publicly traceable.[4] These are useful examples of the material a database can capture, but two prominent orders cannot establish the frequency or character of the wider record.

Anyone reproducing the tally for a filing, research guide, or news report should preserve the following fields:

• The docket number and disposition date.
• The underlying order or docket entry, rather than a secondary case list alone.
• Whether the justice dissented, joined another dissent, or wrote separately.
• Whether the unit is a justice-level vote, an opinion, a docket, a disposition, or a docket-day.
• The treatment of amended, repeated, or same-day orders.
• A cutoff date, because later orders can change a current-term total.

That source discipline matters when research software is involved. A tool can retrieve an opinion but miss a short order, duplicate an amended document, or turn an unreported vote into an inferred one. The same verification problem appears in the site’s review of legal-AI citation checking: a fluent answer is not a substitute for matching the proposition to the primary instrument.

Why 61, 54, and 35 can all appear in responsible accounts

The independently constructed Kastellec–Taboni Shadow Docket Database widens the historical lens. Its reported coverage spans the 1993 through 2024 terms and contains more than 265,000 actions on approximately 220,000 dockets. Using its own docket-day-based approach, the database reports that written dissents peaked at 61 in the 2018 term.[5]

Legalytics, in a separate term-by-term series, reports a high of 54 dissents in 2018-19.[6] Neither figure should be used to revise Jackson’s 35. The 61 and 54 are dataset-level term totals produced under distinct definitions or counting procedures; 35 is a justice-level total of public dissenting votes within Feldman’s October 2010–May 2025 window.

This is not a problem to be resolved by selecting the largest or newest number. A count of written dissents may treat one document differently from a count of individual justices publicly dissenting. A docket-based total may differ from one organized by docket-day. Even term labels require care: “2018 term” and “2018-19 term” may point to the same institutional period while the underlying counting rules still produce different totals.

The broader database also records institutional activity beyond judicial dissents. Kastellec and Taboni reported that, as of October 3, 2025, the Trump administration had filed 22 emergency applications, exceeding the previous reported peak of 16 in 2020.[5] Those are application counts, not dissent counts. They establish the volume of a particular category of requests and should not be cited as evidence that any justice dissented more often or that the applications caused a change in dissent behavior.

Current-term trackers are useful for locating new matters, but continuously updated pages need a retrieval date and a primary-order check before their figures enter a filing or fixed publication. This is the same data-lineage issue that complicates benchmarks built from changing source sets: improved coverage does not erase the need to identify exactly which snapshot produced a result.

The merits docket is a separate comparison

Jackson also stood out in the Court’s merits-docket statistics, but those figures answer a different question. SCOTUSblog’s Stat Pack reported that she issued 10 dissenting opinions in the 2025-26 term, leading the Court for a second consecutive term. It also reported that she was in the majority 67% of the time overall and 41% of the time in non-unanimous cases.[7]

The 10 counts merits-docket dissenting opinions during one term. The 35 counts public shadow-docket dissenting votes across Jackson’s portion of a much longer study window. Adding them to produce “45 total dissents” would discard differences in docket, period, universe, and unit.

The majority rates require similar restraint. A 67% overall majority rate and a 41% rate in non-unanimous merits cases show how often Jackson joined the disposition within the Stat Pack’s merits universe.[7] They do not provide a denominator for her 35 shadow-docket votes, where the Court often withholds a complete voting breakdown.

The defensible comparison is therefore one of coexistence: Jackson’s prominence in the small set of publicly recorded shadow-docket dissents coincided with a leading merits-docket dissent record. The data do not establish that one practice caused the other, that both reflect a single strategy, or that the public tally captures every position she took.

What the record supports

Within Feldman’s defined universe, Jackson’s 35 public dissenting votes place her behind Sotomayor, Thomas, and Alito in the full-window raw totals, while making her a prominent liberal participant despite serving for only the later part of that window.[1] Because the study’s per-term rate of public shadow-docket dissent was roughly 0.4% to 0.9% of non-merits dispositions, her record belongs to an unusually small observable set.

It is fair to describe Jackson as a liberal anchor of that public dissent set and to note that she also led the Court in merits-docket dissenting opinions. But 35 remains a conditional empirical measure: public shadow-docket dissenting votes in the specified window and under the specified method. It is not a complete account of her emergency-docket voting, her motives, litigation strategy, or institutional effect.

References

1. Supreme Court behavior on the shadow docket — SCOTUSblog, September 24, 2025
2. Shadow voting on the shadow docket — SCOTUSblog
3. Noem v. Doe — Supreme Court of the United States
4. SSA v. AFSCME — Supreme Court of the United States
5. A Database of the United States Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket, 1993–2025 — Journal of Law and Courts, Cambridge
6. The Supreme Court’s Long Shadow: Judicial Behavior on the Shadow Docket Between the 2010 and 2025 Terms — Legalytics
7. The 2025-26 term by the numbers — SCOTUSblog, July 2026