This lack of transparency has a practical impact. Because the court doesn’t issue opinions in these cases, lawyers don’t know what legal standards to apply when litigating the issue again in the future. (What if there’s something that Mr. Warner’s lawyers could have said to stay his execution, but they didn’t know what it was?) And because we don’t even know which justices have joined most of the orders, we don’t know which justices are responsible, and we don’t know whether the justices are being consistent and principled from case to case.

These procedural issues also affect the lower courts, which are supposed to follow Supreme Court precedent. But because the lower-court judges don’t know why the Supreme Court does what it does, they sometimes divide sharply when forced to interpret the court’s nonpronouncements. The orders can influence the substance of litigation, too, because a key factor in procedural cases is whether the claim has merit.

To be sure, there are good reasons for the court to proceed quickly and without much explanation in many of these cases. These disputes happen fast, and the justices may not want to commit to a public explanation that they haven’t had time to fully consider. But even modest changes would provide valuable guidance.

What could the court do? First, it could provide more written explanations. It would not need to do so in every case. It could, however, briefly explain its decision when it either reversed a lower court decision, or when it proceeded in the face of a written dissent. In both cases, the presence of a thoughtful written opinion on the other side shows that the court’s decision is not so obvious as to go without saying. In many cases these explanations would take only a paragraph or two — but they would be a big improvement over our current, murky practices.

In the context of opinions on the merits, the justices have recognized the importance of individual accountability. Justice Antonin Scalia has said that writing separate opinions “forces them to think systematically and consistently about the law,” while Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said that it “puts the judge’s conscience and reputation on the line.” The court should extend this logic to the orders docket.

A second, even more modest step toward transparency would be to at least reveal which justices have voted on which side of an orders decision, which the court does not do consistently. Again, the court would not have to do this in every case; it could announce that it would do so whenever there was a dissent, or whenever a dissenting justice requested it. Even knowing which decisions were controversial would enable us to better judge and predict the court.

The court is in the spotlight more and more. Transparency in all its decisions is vital to its continued legitimacy.