WASHINGTON, D.C. — A story published in April 2026 revealed the Supreme Court's 2016 order blocking President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan on its interim docket. The story, based on confidential internal memos obtained from an undisclosed source, was reported by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, who described the 2016 order as marking the birth of the Supreme Court's modern shadow docket, a track the court has since used to make many major decisions.

The April 2026 disclosure was the latest in a series of breaches of the court's traditional secrecy. On May 2, 2022, reporters Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward published what they described as a draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that would overturn the constitutional right to an abortion recognized in Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court confirmed that the draft was authentic and announced that the court's marshal, Gail Curley, would lead an investigation into the leak. In January 2023, the court released a report stating that the marshal's team had been unable to identify by a preponderance of the evidence a person responsible.

The Dobbs leak was followed by protests around the country, including at the Supreme Court building and at some justices' houses. In June 2022, Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the target of an attempted assassination. The would-be assassin, who cited the Dobbs draft leak as a motive, later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years in federal prison.

Leaks of confidential Supreme Court information without accompanying documents have occurred for more than a century. In 1852 and again in 1854, the New York Tribune revealed the outcome of the court's dispute between Pennsylvania and the Wheeling & Belmont Bridge Company before the decisions were released. In 1920, Ashton Embry, a former law clerk to Justice Joseph McKenna, was indicted on charges of leaking the results of a decision in a case involving Southern Pacific Railroad to investors. Embry's indictment was dismissed nearly a decade later.

In 1973, a Supreme Court law clerk revealed the results of the Roe v. Wade decision to a Time magazine reporter on background before the opinion was announced on January 22, 1973. Chief Justice Warren Burger later established a rule that any law clerk seen talking to a reporter would be fired within 20 seconds.

In October 2004, anonymous Supreme Court law clerks spoke with Vanity Fair about the court's handling of Bush v. Gore, criticizing the decision as driven by partisanship of conservative justices, a characterization that drew criticism from other former clerks and judges. In 2024, Kantor and Liptak reported that Justice Amy Coney Barrett once voted against taking the Dobbs case and that although the justices agreed in early January 2021 to grant review, they delayed announcing oral arguments until May at Kavanaugh's suggestion.