Vol. MCMXXVI · Spring Term · Feb. 26, 2026

THE LAWMOVES.WE WRITE IT DOWN.

Landmark rulings. Regulatory shifts. Courtroom drama. Distilled into prose sharp enough to hold a litigator's attention — and precise enough to cite.

Enter the Reading Room Read Today's Docket

Scroll to Read

Docket Legal Journal

Editor's Letter

From the Desk
of the Editor

Legal journalism has a debt it rarely pays: the debt of clarity owed to the people who live inside the law.

We started Docket because we were tired of legal coverage that either talked down to lawyers or spoke past civilians. The law is not a mystery. It is a system — dense, consequential, and occasionally brilliant — and it deserves to be written about with the same rigor it demands of its practitioners.

Every piece in these pages begins with a question a working lawyer would actually ask. Every analysis is written to be cited, not merely read. We do not summarize. We argue. We do not report. We interpret. That is what legal journalism owes its readers — and it is the only standard we hold ourselves to.

“We do not summarize. We argue. We do not report. We interpret.”

E.D.

Eleanor Drummond

Editor in Chief, Docket

Featured Long-Form

This Edition

Full Archive →

Supreme Court columns and architecture in black and white

Constitutional

Feb. 24, 2026·14 min read

The Standing Problem: How the Court Quietly Narrowed Access to Federal Review

Marcus T. HollowaySenior Correspondent, SCOTUS

A trio of decisions handed down in the last eighteen months has redrawn the jurisdictional map in ways that most practitioners have not yet fully mapped.

The doctrine of standing has always been the gatekeeping mechanism of federal jurisdiction — the constitutional tripwire that separates live cases from advisory opinions. But something has shifted. In three decisions spanning the last term and a half, the Court has tightened the injury-in-fact requirement in ways that seem, on their face, incremental, but that in aggregate represent a structural realignment of who can challenge whom in federal court. The first signal came in Harwell v. National Environmental Coalition, where the majority opinion — written with the particular economy of language that signals a holding the author expects to be cited often — held that organizational standing requires demonstration of individual member harm that is not merely probabilistic but

“The injury-in-fact requirement has become, in practice, a theory-of-the-case requirement — and that is a different animal entirely.”

Continue Reading →

Corporate

Feb. 21, 2026·18 min read

Delaware Rewrites the Merger Script: What Corwin Looks Like After Goldstein

Priya NambiarCorporate Law Correspondent

The Court of Chancery's decision in Goldstein v. Apex Holdings doesn't overturn Corwin — it complicates it in ways that make the fully-informed stockholder vote far less reliable as a cleansing device.

For a decade, Corwin v. KKR Financial Holdings stood as the Delaware practitioner's closest approximation to a safe harbor: get a majority of disinterested, fully informed stockholders to approve the transaction, and business judgment review attaches, insulating the board from all but the most egregious claims. The doctrine was clean. It was predictable. It was, in the parlance of the deal bar, workable. Then came Goldstein. Vice Chancellor Renata Osei's opinion, forty-three pages of methodical doctrinal surgery, does not announce a departure from Corwin. It does something more unsettling: it takes Corwin's own logic and follows it to conclusions that Corwin's architects may not have

“Goldstein doesn't kill Corwin. It reveals that Corwin was always more fragile than the deal bar needed it to be.”

Continue Reading →

Regulatory

Feb. 19, 2026·22 min read

After Chevron: A Field Guide to Arguing Statutory Ambiguity in the Post-Deference Era

Samantha Osei-BonsuAdministrative Law Editor

Loper Bright didn't end deference — it ended the shorthand. Courts are still deferring. They're just calling it something else, and practitioners who haven't updated their briefing strategies are losing arguments they should win.

The obituaries were premature. When the Court overruled Chevron in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the administrative law bar exhaled as one and began drafting briefing templates premised on the assumption that agency statutory interpretations would henceforth receive de novo review — that the era of judicial abdication to executive expertise was over. It wasn't. What ended was the label. What persists, dressed in the language of Skidmore and major questions and the constitutional avoidance canon, is a set of judicial habits that look, in outcome if not in doctrine, remarkably similar to what came before. Courts are still crediting agency expertise. They are still declining to second-guess technical determinations. They are still

“The major questions doctrine is Chevron with a different cover letter — and courts are using it to reach the same destinations by different roads.”

Continue Reading →

Stare Decisis—Mens Rea—Habeas Corpus—Amicus Curiae—De Novo Review—Res Judicata—Certiorari—Injunctive Relief—Standing Doctrine—Fiduciary Duty—Stare Decisis—Mens Rea—Habeas Corpus—Amicus Curiae—De Novo Review—Res Judicata—Certiorari—Injunctive Relief—Standing Doctrine—Fiduciary Duty—Stare Decisis—Mens Rea—Habeas Corpus—Amicus Curiae—De Novo Review—Res Judicata—Certiorari—Injunctive Relief—Standing Doctrine—Fiduciary Duty—

Recent Coverage

The Docket

Curated by practice area. Each entry is a hook, not a summary — the full analysis lives in the Reading Room.

ConstitutionalFeb. 25

The Eleventh Circuit's en banc reconsideration of the Florida social media law creates a circuit split that makes certiorari next term all but inevitable.

NetChoice v. Paxton, No. 22-555

BreakingPreview →

CorporateFeb. 24

Vice Chancellor Osei's expansion of the Revlon trigger doctrine to stock-for-stock mergers with a controlling stockholder will unsettle a decade of deal structuring assumptions.

In re Pinnacle Merger Litig., C.A. No. 2025-1187

NewPreview →

CriminalFeb. 23

The Seventh Circuit's reading of the wire fraud statute's "scheme to defraud" language is narrow enough to create a circuit split that defense counsel in white-collar matters should watch closely.

United States v. Callahan, No. 24-1892

NewPreview →

RegulatoryFeb. 22

The SEC's climate disclosure rule survived its first major challenge in the D.C. Circuit on standing grounds — but the court's dicta on the major questions doctrine signals the next line of attack.

Chamber of Commerce v. SEC, No. 24-1021

UpdatedPreview →

ConstitutionalFeb. 20

A district court in the Northern District of Texas applied the major questions doctrine to vacate a federal agency rulemaking for the first time post-Loper Bright, and the reasoning is either brilliant or alarming depending on your administrative law priors.

Texas v. HHS, No. 4:25-cv-00134

NewPreview →

CriminalFeb. 19

The Supreme Court's grant of cert in Haywood v. United States will require the Court to decide whether the categorical approach to ACCA predicates survives its own logic — a question the Justices have been avoiding for six years.

Haywood v. United States, No. 25-112

BreakingPreview →

CorporateFeb. 18

The Delaware legislature's proposed amendments to DGCL Section 144 would codify a defense to interested transaction claims that goes further than any court has been willing to go — and the M&A bar is paying attention.

Del. H.B. 315 (2026)

UpdatedPreview →

RegulatoryFeb. 17

The FTC's new merger guidelines have now survived a preliminary injunction challenge in three circuits — but the D.C. Circuit panel assigned to the next case has a composition that should give the agency pause.

In re Anthem-Cigna Merger Review, No. 24-5201

NewPreview →

Access Full Docket Archive

The Reading Room

The full archive.
The key is your email.

We do not sell advertising. We do not aggregate. We do not publish anything we would be embarrassed to hand to a federal judge. The Reading Room is how we sustain that standard — and what you receive in return is worth the two fields below.

Full Case Archive

Every piece we've published, searchable by citation, practice area, court, and author.

Weekly Briefing PDF

A print-ready digest of the week's most significant rulings, formatted for morning reading.

Annotated Case Digests

Landmark decisions with inline commentary from our editorial board — argument structure, weak points, likely impact.

Practice Area Alerts

Email notifications the moment we publish analysis in your practice area. No noise, no aggregation.

Enter the Reading Room

No password. No paywall. Just your email and your practice area — and everything we publish becomes yours to read, cite, and keep.

Or read without subscribing

The three featured pieces above are open access — no email required. Read them first. If they don't make the form feel obvious, we haven't done our job.

Read Featured Pieces →

The Masthead

Written by lawyers.
Edited without mercy.

Every contributor to Docket has practiced law. We do not hire journalists to cover the law; we train lawyers to write about it. The distinction matters, and it shows in every citation.

847

Pieces Published

12k+

Reading Room Members

94%

Cite Rate Among Subscribers

Vol. I

Est. 2024

Eleanor Drummond

Editor in Chief

J.D., Yale Law School · Former clerk, Hon. Patricia Chen, 2nd Cir.

Beat: Constitutional · Administrative

Marcus T. Holloway

Senior Correspondent

J.D., Columbia Law · Former AUSA, S.D.N.Y.

Beat: Criminal · SCOTUS

Priya Nambiar

Corporate Law Correspondent

J.D., Penn Law · Former associate, Wachtell Lipton

Beat: Corporate · M&A · Delaware

Samantha Osei-Bonsu

Administrative Law Editor

J.D., Harvard Law · Former DOJ, Office of Legal Counsel

Beat: Regulatory · Federal Courts

“The law is a jealous mistress, and requires a long and constant courtship. It is not to be won by trifling favors, but by lavish homage.”
— Joseph Story, Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court

THE LAWMOVES.WE WRITE IT DOWN.

Legal journalism has a debt it rarely pays: the debt of clarity owed to the people who live inside the law.

This Edition

The Standing Problem: How the Court Quietly Narrowed Access to Federal Review

Delaware Rewrites the Merger Script: What Corwin Looks Like After Goldstein

After Chevron: A Field Guide to Arguing Statutory Ambiguity in the Post-Deference Era

The Docket

The full archive.The key is your email.

Enter the Reading Room

Written by lawyers.Edited without mercy.

The full archive.
The key is your email.

Written by lawyers.
Edited without mercy.