The Supreme Court: one docket with a calendar, one without

The merits docket is the one everyone pictures. A petition is filed, four justices must agree to hear it - the rule of four - and of the thousands filed each term roughly seventy to eighty are accepted. Those cases are briefed, argued in open court and decided in a written opinion, and the whole sequence runs on a schedule that is public months ahead.

The emergency docket is a different instrument. Applications for stays and injunctions arrive on their own timetable, are decided on compressed schedules, and are frequently disposed of without an opinion explaining the reasoning. It is commonly called the shadow docket, and its significance has grown: substantive questions with immediate practical effect now get resolved there, at speed, with less visible reasoning than a merits decision carries.

For anyone pricing these markets that division is the first thing to establish. A contract about a case that has been granted certiorari has a knowable timeline. A contract about a policy that could be stayed at any moment is exposed to a docket with no schedule, where the outcome can arrive overnight and without explanation.

Because the Court decides whether a policy exists. The tariff litigation of 2026 is the clean example: on 20 February the Court held in Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump that the emergency economic powers statute does not authorise sweeping, open-ended tariffs, striking down the legal foundation of the central pillar of the administration's trade strategy. That is a decision with a direct, quantifiable effect on import costs across the economy.

It is also a decision that demonstrates the limit of what a court ruling settles. Those tariffs were repealed and replaced under a different statutory provision within days, and the product-specific duties resting on separate authorities never moved. A market that treated the ruling as the end of the policy would have read the case correctly and lost anyway - which is covered in full in the tariffs entry.

The board reflects both the appeal and the difficulty. Contracts on the Court are relatively few and relatively illiquid compared with the size of what they price, largely because writing them well is hard: an outcome is usually not a single binary, a decision can be narrow or broad on the same facts, and the remedy can matter more than the holding.

The Court publishes everything about the merits docket except the timing of individual opinions. Order lists showing which petitions were granted or denied, the argument calendar, transcripts and audio, and the opinions themselves all appear on the Court's own site on a known rhythm. A contract on whether a case is granted certiorari or argued within a term is exceptionally clean to settle.

What is not published is which case comes down on which day. Opinion days are announced, but not which decisions they will carry, so the market's uncertainty in June is concentrated in a small number of sessions with a known set of outstanding cases. That structure produces a distinctive pattern: probability mass compresses onto a handful of dates as the term closes.

The emergency docket publishes the order and not always the reasoning. Applications, responses and the eventual order appear, but a disposition can arrive without an opinion, which means the market learns the outcome without learning the principle. For a contract about a single application that is sufficient; for anything that depends on what the ruling implies for the next case, it is much less than it looks.