Now it’s Sotomayor who schools Ketanji Brown Jackson on the law
Recently Justice Barrett gave Jackson somewhat of a tongue-lashing when Barrett wrote the majority opinion on the national injunction case. I wrote about it in this recent post. That sort of personal dissing is somewhat unusual between or among SCOTUS colleagues. But at least Barrett and Jackson are on different sides of the political spectrum.
Now the task of reprimanding Jackson has fallen to a fellow liberal justice, Sonia Sotomayor. That’s even more newsworthy:
? OMG: Now a LIBERAL Supreme Court justice is trying to teach Justice Ketanji Jackson how this whole "judicial" thing works…
Jackson is the ONLY dissent. Sotomayor has to remind Jackson, for some reason, that the case before them is NOT about what Jackson thought it was.
My… https://t.co/XC1BkhrMs3 pic.twitter.com/FFGFz41Ous
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 8, 2025
I find it interesting that both of these chidings were issued by other women on the Court.
I find it interesting that both of these chidings were issued by other women on the Court.
My first thought is that it is just the power politics of anti sexism or anti racism at work. If a man had made those statements, then he could be called sexist. I can imagine that Roberts pulled Barrett aside and said, “Hey Amy, do want to write something on this?? Pretty please!”
A second thought is, maybe the two ladies are thinking: “We don’t want to be lumped together as a bunch of wrong-headed females, so we really want to write this.”
Jackson keeps saying the quiet part out loud, that’s the problem. Makes it harder for the other two leftists.
The Name of the Rose has a scene where one of the advocates on the side of the protagonists ruins their case every time he opens his mouth, but they can’t make him stop talking, so they invoke St Francis for protection.
I think every now & then you find someone so bad at their job that you want them to stop flailing about & calling attention to themselves, hoping just maybe if they watch the pros long enough they’ll get better.
Sitting on the couch vegging after a long day and the nightly news comes on – WGN Chicago. They cover this very story, quoting at length Jackson’s descent, effectively portraying her as some lone hero speaking truth to power. Dear lord. Great ending to my day.
Related:
“The Judge-Emperor: The Global Coup of the Courts”—
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21730/judge-emperor-courts
H/T Powerline blog.
…wherein the author compares three countries (Israel, France and the US), along with the EU, that are assailed from within by judicial overreach.
Concluding graf:
Justice Kagan, on another case, didn’t lecture her two colleagues, but she did diverge from them, as she sometimes does, being the only qualified lawyer among them (one who actually understands legal briefs and the role of courts).
She doesn’t always act on that knowledge, but IMO she also knows when NOT supporting the conservative majority will bite the Democrats later.
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/07/04/justice-kagan-joins-colleagues-in-rebuking-liberal-boston-judge-over-his-defiance-of-the-court/
One can teach algebra to a horse but it does little good and simply annoys the horse. Similarly, one can teach reason and logic to a leftard but it does little good and simply annoys the leftard.
Up until recently it seems to me that most supreme court justices have at least been well above average in terms of intellect, with many verging on exceptional by my admittely limited assessment. So having a person that appears to be so deeply ignorant reach such a rare position is a bit depressing. It’s to be somewhat expected in congress where you have a considerably larger sample size of well over 400 people, so a few dimwits are liable to pop up here and there (I seem to recall some congressman who feared an island would capsize if there were too many people on one side of it). But in a group of only 9 one would hope you’d only get the best of the best. Apparently not though.
The left is circling the wagons, talking about Jackson’s illustrious career and her bona fides, but let’s face it: she is basically a striver who took full advantage of a system that wanted her to succeed and did everything it could to facilitate her success based entirely on her skin color. Everyone she clerked for, every firm she worked for, the sentencing commission, D.C. District Court, the bureaucracy everywhere could mask her deficiencies.
But now, having become an exemplar of the Peter Principle by rising to her level of incompetence, there’s nowhere to hide, and she believes she did it on her own, rather than having every obstacle removed from her path. Now the ignorance as well as the arrogance is on display. And even though she has only eight peers to impress, she can’t do it. They, of all observers, see right through her bluff and bluster and know she’s a mediocre at best jurist.
If Justice Brown was given special treatment in her career, she didn’t rise to her “level of incompetence,” but instead far above it.
That she has risen to the highest level of the Judicial Branch, exemplifies our national dysfunction.
@Nonapod:Up until recently it seems to me that most supreme court justices have at least been well above average in terms of intellect, with many verging on exceptional by my admittely limited assessment.
We dodged a bullet when George W. Bush nominated Harriet Miers. She withdrew and we got Alito instead. I’m sure she was good at what she did before, and maybe her heart was in the right place, but she wouldn’t have been Alito.
There is no danger whatsoever that Justice Brown will pull one of the conservative justices to her side of any case with her legal reasoning.
I’ve said this before, but since we can’t have all conservatives on the Court, conservatives should be thrilled with Brown. Her Supreme Court tenure is much better for conservatives than if Biden had nominated another Kagan.
The only down side is that leftists are beginning to realize that maybe they ought to select Supreme Court nominees a little differently than they have of late.
While I do believe Jackson has the ability to read, she has difficulty talking in complete sentences (as seen in her confirmation hearing), and I doubt she has the ability to write beyond the most rudimentary of sentences. Ergo, her dissenting opinions are likely being written by her clerks, recent Ivy League law school grads. Knowing Jackson, these clerks were also likely DEI admissions and hires, which is why her supposed writings are sloppy and filled with slang.
drmeadox:
I looked at her Wikipedia entry, which is of course more hagiographic than other sources, but it does have some facts in it. One of them is that she was a champion debater in high school and she says it impacted her ability to “do law,” or whatever.
I’d really like to have access to those debates to see if she actually argued the question or was just loud and wordy enough to impress the rube judges who thought it would be awesome if the black girl won.
@Mitchell Strand:I’d really like to have access to those debates to see if she actually argued the question
This approving article is from 2014, but I think that’s long after Jackson’s high school days. Intellectually I would bet that she’s probably above average of the general population in a lot of ways, but markedly below what is the bar for Supreme Court Justices.
Fair warning that the article I linked to is pushing a deceptive narrative. The black students did not invent this style of debate, they were not breaking any rules, and this particular debate championship had been won by non-black teams who basically did the same kinds of things for many years before.
For those who don’t click links:
Perhaps Justice Jackson does in fact know the law and understands the cases brought before the court, but she is just not interested in upholding the law.
Maybe she renders opinions based upon what she believes the law should be – not what the law actually is – or what government policies should be, whether or not it violates existing laws.
If this is the case she lied when she swore to uphold the Constitution.
OTOH, maybe she is just a smart ass moron; sort of like the Kamala Cackling Harris of the SCOTUS. Recall that Jackson could not define what a woman is, citing that she could not do so because she is not a doctor.
I guess she figured her response was witty or smart.
Apparently Jackson is the most outspoken justice during oral arguments, based upon the number of words she has spoken.
Of course, what matters most is what one says, not how often one speaks.
Bauxite:
I think that’s right. It’s a point I made on I think RedState this morning. I’m fine with Jackson being the lone, stupid voice in the wilderness, the “1” in every 8-1 decision. There’s never been a more convenient time for a person of her limitations to be on the court. Trump has 3 1/2 more years, and if he turns the country around, JD Vance could extend the dynasty eight years. In that time, Republicans could replace Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan, making the Court a consistent 7-2 or 6-3 proposition, depending on Roberts’ testicular fortitude on a given day.
@Mitchell Strand:n that time, Republicans could replace Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan, making the Court a consistent 7-2 or 6-3 proposition…
It really would have been better had the Supreme Court been set up with long, staggered terms with no one able to serve more than once. I think there’d be about the same level of turnover and about the same level of influence of past administrations on its makeup, but there’d be a lot less drama. Each President would get to pick two or three in each term depending on how you set it up.
@Niketas Choniates:
It’s a good idea, but the Rubicon has been crossed regarding the Supreme Court. It’s now just a superlegislature that both sides think of as the jewel in the crown in terms of power. Any reform would be fought tooth and nail by both sides, one unwilling to give up power, the other unwilling to give up their next shot at it. And even if both craven parties had a “come to Jesus” moment, the court itself would probably fight it tooth and nail as well.
“You’re stupid”, said the imbecile to the idiot.