Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a formal apology Wednesday for remarks she made about Brett Kavanaugh's upbringing, marking an unusual moment of public friction between the Supreme Court's ideological camps.
In a statement, Sotomayor acknowledged that comments she made at the University of Kansas School of Law last week were inappropriate and hurtful. She said she had already apologized directly to Kavanaugh.
The comments in question centered on an immigration case. During her public appearance on April 7, Sotomayor criticized an opinion Kavanaugh had written defending the Trump administration's broad immigration enforcement operations in Los Angeles. Without naming him, she said: "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 and grew up in Maryland suburbs outside Washington, voted with the court's conservative majority to uphold the sweeps. Sotomayor, the court's first Latina justice whose parents were Puerto Rican, dissented from the Bronx, where she spent her childhood in public housing.
In his opinion, Kavanaugh wrote that the presence of undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles area, who tend to gather in specific locations seeking daily work in construction and related fields and may not speak English, gave law enforcement reasonable suspicion to stop people. Sotomayor's dissent centered on Fourth Amendment concerns about targeting without proper suspicion.
The public spat surfaced a crack in the court's carefully maintained facade of collegiality. Supreme Court justices typically emphasize how they manage sharp disagreements respectfully, presenting themselves as friends across ideological lines despite heated opinions.
The tension extends beyond this single exchange. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recently criticized how the court handles Trump administration cases, expanding on those criticisms in a speech at Yale Law School on Monday. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas addressed the fraying of judicial relations in his own remarks Wednesday at the University of Texas at Austin.
"I joined the court that dealt with differences as friends, as we respected each other," Thomas said. "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."
Thomas expressed concern that the current climate could spread to younger judges entering the profession, warning that the court itself may suffer from eroding institutional respect.
The court faces a critical closing stretch to its current term, ending in late June, when some of the year's most significant rulings will be issued. Those periods typically heighten tensions as justices finalize positions on controversial cases.
Author Sarah Mitchell: "When justices start publicly apologizing for comments about colleagues' life experiences, the court's veneer of institutional harmony is cracking in ways that matter."
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