Despite tensions, Supreme Court justices downplay sharp comments aimed at each other
It has been a strained spring at the U.S. Supreme Court.
There was rare public criticism of one justice by another that raised eyebrows and prompted a public apology. On the bench, there have been uncomfortable moments. And published opinions have featured some snippy language.
“Sometimes, we forget that they are people,” says Jessica A. Schoenherr, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Georgia who has studied interpersonal relationships among the justices. “They are not, as one of my students elegantly put it, law robots. They have feelings and emotions, and they can’t keep them under wraps all the time.”
The most extreme and uncharacteristic incident came in early April. Justice Sonia Sotomayor obliquely criticized her colleague Justice Brett Kavanaugh in unusually pointed terms over his concurrence in a September emergency-docket decision in which the court allowed the federal government to resume immigration-related stops of individuals in the Los Angeles area.
Kavanaugh had written in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” for such stops but “it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.” He suggested U.S. citizens and those “otherwise lawfully in the United States … will be free to go after the brief encounter.”
Sotomayor, the first Latina member of the court, had written in her dissent in that case, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that “the government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”
At an appearance at the University of Kansas School of Law on April 7, Sotomayor referenced the case and criticized Kavanaugh without naming him.
“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said, adding that such stops can have consequences for people’s jobs and families.
“This is from a man whose parents were professionals and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour or the piece like I do,” she added.
The comments drew wide attention, though Kavanaugh did not respond publicly. On April 15, Sotomayor issued a public apology, saying her remarks in Kansas were “inappropriate.”
“I regret my hurtful comments,” she said. “I have apologized to my colleague.”
Schoenherr says that Sotomayor’s law school comments were an example of a justice saying “the quiet part out loud.”
Interruptions on the bench
Meanwhile, on the bench in recent months, some justices appear to have grown frustrated with one or two of their colleagues over the duration of questioning or interruptions during the hurly-burly of oral arguments.
Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson are known for asking lengthy series of questions to arguing lawyers, especially those from the U.S. solicitor general’s office who are often defending the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Both ask pressing questions “of the kind meant to elicit a particular answer, like when a lawyer is deposing a witness,” says Jaime A. Santos, a partner at Goodwin Procter and a co-chair of its appellate and Supreme Court litigation practice, who attends arguments relatively frequently.
She says that while Jackson at least gives lawyers a fair chance to respond, Sotomayor sometimes does not, leading Chief Justice John Roberts to appear “more and more frustrated with that this term.”
Roberts has intervened when she has gone on at length. He did that during April 22 arguments in Blanche v. Lau, an immigration case. Sotomayor tangled with Sopan Joshi, an assistant to the U.S. solicitor general, for several minutes, often interrupting his responses.
The chief justice cut her off and said to Joshi: “I’m sorry, … would you like to finish that answer?”
In the same argument, Justice Amy Coney Barrett brusquely blocked an attempt by Jackson to interrupt her series of questions of Joshi, holding her left hand out toward her colleague at the opposite end of the bench and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m not quite finished.”
Santos says the sharper elbows on the bench “is a dynamic that I’m keeping an eye on, because it gives me pause.”
She says she has seen more body language from Roberts than usual as he tries to referee argument sessions.
“I think he’s trying to navigate and say, ‘How do I step in and make oral argument helpful to the court when everyone here on this bench has the word ‘justice’ before their name, and it’s not really my job to tell people how to ask questions?” Santos says.
Some criticisms ‘cannot go unanswered’
Much of the current tension stems from the dominance of the six-justice conservative majority and the frustration of the court’s three more liberal members—Sotomayor, Jackson, and Justice Elena Kagan—who are frequently in dissent.
The 2025-26 term has featured several decisions reflecting that 6-3 lineup, both on the court’s regular docket and its docket for emergency or interim relief, also known as the shadow docket. Among them was the court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which limited the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and allowed the elimination of a majority-Black congressional district in the Southern state.
Kagan read from the bench at length from a summary of her sharp dissent, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, saying that with the majority’s decision, “this court’s effort to dismantle and, indeed, destroy the Voting Rights Act is complete.”
Her written opinion ends with, “I dissent,” instead of her customary “I respectfully dissent.”
A few days later, Jackson dissented alone when the court agreed to speed up its issuance of the mandate in the case at Louisiana’s request, which allowed the state to revise its congressional map ahead of a postponed primary election.
The court “unshackles itself” from normal procedures concerning when it issues a final judgment, Jackson wrote, adding that “those principles give way to power.”
Justice Samuel Alito, in a concurrence joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, said Jackson’s charges “cannot go unanswered,” calling her assertions “groundless and utterly irresponsible” and “baseless and insulting.”
Michael J. Nelson, a political science professor at Penn State University who is a co-author of the 2023 book The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary, says one reason for increased tensions among the justices is an increase in separate concurrences and dissents.
Such separate writings allow the justices “to say exactly what they want to say in a way” that is often unconstrained by their colleagues, he says. “That is providing a mechanism for which some of this lack of collegiality is able to spill out in the open.”
Good at ‘compartmentalizing’
The justices themselves tend to downplay any tensions as reflective of the tough cases they must decide.
“Do we disagree on hard cases? Yes, Jan, we do,” Gorsuch told CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford during a recent interview about his new children’s book. “There are nine of us, appointed by five different presidents over the course of 30 years. Can you get nine of your best friends to agree on where to go to lunch?”
Jackson, at a May 12 appearance at Southern Methodist University, insisted that relations were “fine.”
“We are very good at compartmentalizing. It’s part of the job,” she reportedly said, adding that the justices will disagree in their opinions, “but in our day-to-day interactions, none of us takes it personally, and we get along just fine.”
Thomas has had a slightly different take on collegiality among his colleagues. Appearing at the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Conference near Miami on May 14, Thomas repeated a theme he has voiced before—that it’s “a different court now” from the one he joined in 1991.
The friendships of his early tenure “were much, much deeper” than they are now, he said. “The relationships are different [now], even though they are not negative in any way.”
If nothing else, the court’s summer recess is just around the corner, which may help soothe the justices’ jangled nerves.
“It’s nice that we have a break in the summer,” the chief justice said during a public appearance last year. That is a turnabout from the famous quip by Roberts when he was a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1983, that “only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off.”
Speaking in Buffalo, New York, in May 2025, Roberts said, “We work at very close quarters on very important issues, on very sensitive issues, at work that is hard to do, and we do need a little break from each other.”
People reading the news and the court’s decision in May and June “maybe, think, ‘boy, those people really must, you know, hate each other.” he said. “And we don’t.”
Write a letter to the editor, share a story tip or update, or report an error.
