The Supreme Court and lower federal courts had many clashes in 2025, highlighting tensions between federal judges and the courts above them.
In an eventful year in the courts, the record number of stays the Supreme Court granted on its emergency docket fueled clashes between the high court and lower courts in hotly contested legal disputes, mostly over Trump administration policies and actions.
Supreme Court pushes back on lower courts’ disregarding orders
The Supreme Court pushed back against lower court judges disregarding previous orders in emergency docket orders in 2025, including one case that drew a sharp rebuke from Justice Neil Gorsuch.
In August, the Supreme Court granted an emergency request to allow the cancellation of $783 million in diversity, equity, and inclusion-related grants from the National Institutes of Health, after it previously gave the green light for the Trump administration to cut $65 million in DEI-related teacher training grants in April on the emergency docket.
The August order, which granted another pause in a nearly identical case, included a concurrence from Gorsuch, who took aim at lower court judges with a warning that they “may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them.”
“So this is now the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case squarely controlled by one of its precedents,” Gorsuch wrote in his August concurrence.
“All these interventions should have been unnecessary, but together they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress,” he added.
The other major instance of a justice calling out a lower court in a ruling came in July, when the high court had to issue a clarification in an emergency docket case where the Supreme Court allowed for the deportation of illegal immigrants to “third countries.” The clarification was issued after a district court still attempted to block the deportation of a group of illegal immigrants to South Sudan based on a technicality.
Justice Elena Kagan, who joined the majority of the initial order, concurred with the clarification, calling out the district court for trying to disregard the high court’s ruling.
“I continue to believe that this Court should not have stayed the District Court’s April 18 order enjoining the Government from deporting non-citizens to third countries without notice or a meaningful opportunity to be heard,” she wrote in her concurrence.
“But a majority of this Court saw things differently, and I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed,” Kagan said.
Lower court judges take aim at Supreme Court orders
While most federal judges tend not to throw jabs at the justices on the Supreme Court, some offered sharp rebukes aimed at the high court over its emergency orders.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs offered a thinly veiled jab at Gorsuch’s comments about disregarding Supreme Court orders when she issued a ruling blocking the Trump administration from freezing $2.2 billion in federal funds to Harvard University in September.
“This Court understands, of course, that the Supreme Court, like the district courts, is trying to resolve these issues quickly, often on an emergency basis, and that the issues are complex and evolving,” Burroughs wrote.
“Given this, however, the Court respectfully submits that it is unhelpful and unnecessary to criticize district courts for ‘defy[ing]’ the Supreme Court when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape, where they must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus,” she said.
The Supreme Court also faced jabs from anonymous federal judges who spoke to NBC News earlier this year, with one accusing the high court of “inexcusable” orders on its emergency docket that show the justices “don’t have our backs.”
Another unnamed federal judge accused the high court of aiding the Trump administration with its emergency orders in “undermining the lower courts,” saying lower court judges have been “thrown under the bus” by the justices’ orders.
The hostility was not shared by all lower court judges — not even by the federal judge whom Gorsuch called out for allegedly defying the high court’s previous emergency docket order.
“Those justices, and indeed the entire court, can be assured that this court will absolutely obey and generously adhere to the precedential decisions of the Supreme Court, as I have done and tried to do throughout all my judicial service,” U.S. District Judge William Young said in a September hearing.
Supreme Court justices also clashed with each other in some rulings this year
While there were some clashes between lower courts and the Supreme Court, there were also multiple instances in 2025 where justices took aim at their colleagues on the high court.
In the majority opinion for Trump v. CASA, Justice Amy Coney Barrett swiftly dismissed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent, which attacked the majority for limiting lower courts’ ability to issue universal injunctions.
“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary,” Barrett wrote in her opinion.
Barrett also noted in a footnote that “among its many problems,” Jackson’s rationale in her dissent “is at odds with our system of divided judicial authority.”
The sharp rebuke by Barrett of her fellow justice was widely noted when it was issued in June 2025, with Barrett later defending her spicy opinion, saying “I attack ideas, not people,” quoting the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
The various orders issued by the high court in 2025, which handed President Donald Trump a record number of wins on the emergency docket, generally fell along ideological lines, with the six Republican-appointed justices and the three Democrat-appointed justices. As the number of successful emergency docket requests continued to accumulate, the liberal minority expressed increasing frustration through its dissents, accusing the majority of misusing the emergency docket.
One of the most blistering dissents came in an emergency order allowing Texas to use its newly redrawn congressional map for the 2026 elections. Kagan wrote the dissent for the minority, arguing that the majority failed to understand its role when reviewing emergency petitions.
“The majority today loses sight of its proper role. It is supposed to review the District Court’s factfinding only for clear error. But under that deferential standard, the District Court’s ‘plausible’ (actually, quite careful) factfinding must survive. The majority can reach the result it does— overturning the District Court’s finding of racial line-drawing, even if to achieve partisan goals—only by arrogating to itself that court’s rightful function,” she wrote in her December dissent.
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“We know better, the majority declares today. I cannot think of a reason why. And this Court’s eagerness to playact a district court here has serious consequence,” Kagan wrote.
With several hot-button issues slated to be decided at the Supreme Court in 2026, including Trump’s controversial birthright citizenship order, there could be additional clashes between courts and the justices.