Justice Sonia Sotomayor issues unusual apology over ‘hurtful’ remarks about colleague Brett Kavanaugh
WASHINGTON — Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an unusual apology Wednesday for critical remarks she made about the upbringing of one of her conservative colleagues, Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
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“At a recent appearance at the University of Kansas School of Law, I referred to a disagreement with one of my colleagues in a prior case, but I made remarks that were inappropriate,” Sotomayor said in a statement issued by the court. “I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.”
She was referring to an appearance last week in which she had sharp words for an opinion Kavanaugh wrote last year relating to a decision that allowed the Trump administration to conduct broad immigration sweeps in the Los Angeles area.
Kavanaugh was in the majority, while Sotomayor dissented. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.
Without mentioning him by name, Sotomayor on April 7 referred Kavanaugh’s opinion, which sought to explain why he joined the majority, according to a Bloomberg Law report.
She then added, Bloomberg Law reported: “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
Kavanaugh, who is white, grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, while Sotomayor, the first Latina to serve on the court, whose parents were from Puerto Rico, spent her childhood in a public housing project in the Bronx, New York.
In the opinion Sotomayor criticized, Kavanaugh downplayed concerns that constitutional violations were taking place during the immigration sweeps through the targeting of people without “reasonable suspicion” under the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.
He said, for example, that there is a large community of undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles area and that they “tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work,” frequently work in construction or related jobs, and may not speak English.
As a result, law enforcement would be likely to have reasonable suspicion to stop people in many circumstances, he added.
Supreme Court justices regularly make public appearances, and they generally speak about how collegial they are despite sharp ideological differences. Sotomayor’s comments showed a crack in that positive depiction of life on the court.
Similarly, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pulled no punches in a recent public appearance with Kavanaugh in which she heavily criticized the court’s handling of cases involving the Trump administration.
Jackson expanded on that criticism in a lengthy speech at Yale Law School on Monday.
Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas has bemoaned the fraying of relations on the court in recent years, a theme he returned to in his own public comments Wednesday at an appearance at the University of Texas at Austin.
“I joined the court that dealt with differences as friends, as we respected each other. … That’s civility. I don’t know how you bring it back in the current environment with social media and name calling and all and people accusing each other of various things and animus,” he said.
“I don’t know how you do that, and I fear that that’s going to infect the institutions such as the court and judges, etc., in the future, because these are young people who will be in these jobs,” he added.
The court is gearing up to issue some of the biggest rulings of its current term, which concludes at the end of June, a period when tensions sometimes run high.
