The return of summary adjudication?

For a long time, SCOTUS had a great deal of mandatory jurisdiction. Prior to 1976, actions to enjoin enforcement of constitutionally defective federal and state laws were heard by three-judge district courts with direct and mandatory review by SCOTUS. Prior to 1988, SCOTUS had appellate (mandatory) jurisdiction over state court judgments that invalidated federal statutes or upheld state statutes in the face of federal (usually constitutional) challenge. This obviously played some role (how much is an empirical question that I would like to explore someday) in the Court's docket being significantly larger from the '60s through the mid-'80s. One way the Court handled that larger docket was through summary and memorandum dispositions (both to affirm and to reverse) of some of these mandatory-jurisdiction cases (again, the numbers are for future exploration).

For now, I am wondering whether the Court's seemingly increasing practice of summary grant-and-reverse decisions--part of what Will Baude described as the Court's Shadow Docket and which Richard further discussed--reflects a return to this practice. Monday's decision in Taylor v. Burke (which I discussed Wednesday) is the latest example of the practice, which is especially prominent in certain types of cases (notably § 1983/qualified immunity and habeas) involving certain types of outcomes (predominantly, although not always, where the government/officer lost in the lower court). As before, summary procedures allow the Court to speak to and resolve a greater number of cases, even if not in the fullest fashion.

The difference is that the earlier practice was (at least arguably) necessary to handle the heavier caseload that Congress had imposed on the Court; the Justices could not address so many cases if they had to give plenary review to each of them. On the other hand, necessity does not dictate the current practice--the Court is not doing this because it has no other way to handle these cases or because it would be unduly burdened by giving plenary review to more cases. Instead, it reflects the Justices' strategic choice to reach more cases and issues, often towards a particular substantive end, but without expressly acknowledging an expansion of its jurisdiction or its certiorari practices and without, as Baude puts it, their "otherwise high standards of transparency and legal craft."