Justice Sotomayor Apologizes for Public Remarks About Justice Kavanaugh

On April 15, 2026, the Supreme Court's Public Information Office released a three-sentence statement from Justice Sonia Sotomayor that, by the standards of the institution, amounted to a seismic event: a sitting justice publicly apologizing to a colleague.

"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 wrote. "I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague." [1]

The colleague was Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The disagreement was about immigration enforcement, the Fourth Amendment, and who gets to define what counts as a minor inconvenience. The fallout has become a prism through which nearly every fault line at the modern Court — ideological, personal, institutional — is now refracting.

What Sotomayor Said

Eight days before the apology, on April 7, Sotomayor appeared at the University of Kansas School of Law. During a discussion of her judicial philosophy, she turned to the case of Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, a September 2025 emergency-docket ruling that allowed the Trump administration to resume broad immigration enforcement sweeps in the Los Angeles area [2].

Kavanaugh had written a concurring opinion in the case arguing that while "apparent ethnicity alone cannot justify a stop," it could be "a relevant factor" in establishing reasonable suspicion under the Fourth Amendment. He characterized the resulting encounters as "typically brief," asserting that affected individuals could "promptly go free" [3].

Sotomayor, who had dissented sharply in the case itself, went further in Kansas than her written opinion had. Without naming Kavanaugh directly, she said:

"I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops. This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn't really know any person who works by the hour." [4]

She then described the real-world consequences for detained workers: "Those hours that they took you away, nobody's paying that person. And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night and maybe just cold supper." [4]

The remarks drew immediate attention because they crossed a line that justices almost universally observe: criticizing a colleague's judicial reasoning is routine, but questioning a colleague's life experience and capacity for empathy is something else.

The Immigration Case Behind the Conflict

The underlying dispute is substantive and ongoing. In Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, plaintiffs challenged immigration enforcement sweeps in Los Angeles, arguing they violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. A federal district court agreed and issued an injunction, later upheld by the Ninth Circuit [3].

The Supreme Court, in an unsigned order on its emergency docket, stayed the injunction and allowed sweeps to resume. Kavanaugh's concurrence attracted particular scrutiny for its treatment of race in reasonable-suspicion determinations [5].

Immigration advocacy groups coined the term "Kavanaugh stops" to describe the encounters that followed. According to reporting and court filings, citizens profiled by immigration agents were detained for extended periods, sometimes without access to lawyers, and at least 20 children were among those held [6]. Kavanaugh later issued a clarification in a subsequent opinion stating that federal officers "must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity" [7].

In her original written dissent, Sotomayor had been pointed but stayed within traditional bounds: "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." [6]

The Kansas remarks added a personal dimension that her written dissent had not.

How Rare Is a Supreme Court Apology?

In the Court's 235-year history, public apologies from sitting justices to colleagues are vanishingly uncommon. The only clear modern precedent is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's July 2016 apology for comments about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump [8].

Source: Historical records

Data as of Apr 15, 2026CSV

In a series of interviews, Ginsburg had called Trump "a faker" and said she "can't imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president." She later issued a statement: "On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them. Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office." [8]

The parallels are instructive but imperfect. Ginsburg's comments targeted a political candidate — a clearer violation of judicial norms against political involvement. Sotomayor's comments targeted a fellow justice's reasoning and background in connection with a decided case, which straddles the boundary between legitimate judicial speech and personal attack.

No other documented instances of a sitting Supreme Court justice formally apologizing to a colleague through official channels have surfaced in the historical record. Justices have made cutting remarks about one another for centuries — Justice Antonin Scalia was famous for barbed dissents calling colleagues' reasoning "pure applesauce" and "jiggery-pokery" — but those attacks remained in written opinions and were never followed by apologies [9].

The Code of Conduct Question

In November 2023, the Supreme Court adopted its first-ever formal code of conduct, a set of five ethical canons with accompanying commentary [10]. The code was a response to sustained public pressure over undisclosed gifts and travel by certain justices.

The code addresses extrajudicial activities and public appearances, drawing on principles long applicable to lower federal courts. Canon 2 states that a justice "should act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary." Canon 4 permits extrajudicial activities that "do not cast reasonable doubt on the capacity to decide impartially any issue that may come before" a justice [10].

Whether Sotomayor's Kansas remarks constitute a violation is debatable. The code does not explicitly prohibit public commentary about colleagues, and its enforcement mechanism is essentially nonexistent — the code relies on self-policing by the justices themselves. Legal commentators have generally treated the remarks as a breach of institutional norms rather than a technical code violation, given the code's lack of specificity on interpersonal critiques [11].

The Case For and Against the Original Remarks

The case that Sotomayor was within bounds: Legal scholars have long argued that justices have both a right and an obligation to publicly explain their dissents. Dissenting opinions exist, in part, to "write for the future" — to persuade future courts, Congress, or the public that the majority got it wrong [12]. When justices read dissents from the bench, an act reserved for cases of particular importance, they are signaling that the stakes transcend ordinary legal disagreement.

Sotomayor framed her own Kansas remarks in these terms. "I was not talking as a Latino justice," she said during the event. "I was talking about a justice who respects precedent. And I was explaining why that precedent is being violated." [4] From this perspective, pointing out that a colleague's life experience may create blind spots in understanding the impact of a ruling is a form of substantive critique, not a personal attack.

The case that she crossed a line: George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who has written extensively about judicial decorum, called the remarks "a disturbing departure from the tradition of collegiality and civility on the court" and characterized them as "unfair and unwarranted." [13] Turley noted that Sotomayor herself graduated from Princeton and Yale, making the privilege framing "petty." He further pointed out that Kavanaugh's mother was a history professor who attended law school while raising a family — a biographical detail that complicates the caricature of unchecked privilege [13].

The distinction matters because it tracks a broader debate about what kind of judicial speech serves the public and what kind corrodes the institution. Critics of the remarks argue that ad hominem observations about a colleague's upbringing, even if directionally accurate, set a precedent that any justice's reasoning can be dismissed by attacking their biography rather than engaging their legal arguments.

Political Reactions and Instrumentalization

The episode produced a predictable pattern. Conservative commentators seized on Sotomayor's original remarks as evidence of institutional decay. Turley framed them as "the latest sign of SCOTUS' slipping standards" [13]. The Washington Examiner and Fox News amplified calls for accountability [14].

From the other direction, immigration advocates argued that Sotomayor's underlying point was correct and important. Liberal groups that had coined the term "Kavanaugh stops" viewed her remarks as a rare instance of a justice giving voice to the people most directly affected by the Court's emergency-docket rulings [6]. The Progressive published an argument — albeit about Sotomayor's earlier "wise Latina" controversy — that life experience legitimately shapes judicial perspective and that acknowledging this is a strength, not a flaw [15].

The same-day timing of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's separate public statement chiding conservative colleagues over what she called "oblivious" emergency orders added fuel to the perception that the liberal wing was engaged in a coordinated public campaign [16]. Whether that perception is fair or not, it shaped how the apology landed: conservatives treated it as a vindication, while some on the left saw it as an unnecessary concession.

This pattern — where decorum arguments are deployed selectively depending on whose ox is gored — is itself a recurring feature of Supreme Court politics. When Justice Clarence Thomas has made public statements about colleagues or institutional critics, calls for apologies from the right have been muted. When liberal justices break protocol, conservative commentators treat it as a five-alarm fire, and vice versa.

The Deliberative Process and Institutional Stakes

Former law clerks and Court historians have consistently described the justices' deliberative process as dependent on personal relationships. After oral arguments, the justices meet in private conference to cast preliminary votes. The chief justice, and the senior justice in the majority, assign opinion authorship — decisions that can shape how broadly or narrowly a ruling is written [17].

Coalition-building on close cases — particularly 5-4 or 6-3 decisions where a single vote can shift the outcome — requires negotiation, trust, and a degree of interpersonal goodwill. Scholars have noted that even justices who disagree sharply on the law have historically maintained working relationships that enable compromise on opinion language [17].

Public personal attacks risk disrupting this dynamic. While there is no direct evidence that the Sotomayor-Kavanaugh exchange has affected case assignments or deliberations, the concern is structural: if justices begin treating public appearances as venues for interpersonal grievances, the already strained norms of private deliberation could erode further.

The Court's public approval offers context for these stakes. Gallup polling shows job approval at 40% in 2025, down from 62% in 2000 and 58% as recently as 2020 [18]. Only 23% of Democrats approve of the Court's performance, and 43% of Americans describe it as "too conservative" — the highest figure in Gallup's trend [18].

Source: Gallup

Data as of Sep 1, 2025CSV

Against this backdrop, episodes that make the Court look like any other political institution — with members publicly sniping at one another — carry institutional costs that transcend the merits of any individual disagreement.

Ethics Reform and the Legislative Landscape

The Sotomayor-Kavanaugh episode arrives as Congress continues to debate Supreme Court ethics legislation. The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency (SCERT) Act of 2025, reintroduced by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Hank Johnson, would require the Court to adopt a binding code of conduct with an actual enforcement mechanism, mandate that recusal decisions be reviewed by panels of other judges, and require greater transparency around gifts, travel, and amicus brief funding [19].

The legislation, introduced as S. 1814 and H.R. 3513 in the 119th Congress, remains in the early stages of the legislative process [19]. Proponents argue that the Court's self-adopted 2023 code is insufficient precisely because it lacks enforcement teeth — Sotomayor's remarks and apology unfolded entirely outside any formal review process, resolved only by the justice's own decision to walk back her statements.

Whether this episode strengthens or weakens the case for reform depends on perspective. Supporters of the SCERT Act can point to it as evidence that the self-policing model produces inconsistent results: Sotomayor apologized voluntarily, but there is no mechanism to address situations where a justice declines to do so. Opponents can argue the opposite — that the apology demonstrates the norms are working and that the institution can self-correct without congressional intervention.

Historical Comparisons

The Sotomayor-Kavanaugh exchange fits within a longer history of sharp public disagreement among justices, though it stands out for the personal nature of the critique and the subsequent apology.

Justice Scalia built a career on rhetorical aggression in written opinions, famously deriding colleagues' reasoning as "interpretive jiggery-pokery" in King v. Burwell and writing that one majority opinion's reasoning was "pure applesauce." [9] None of these were followed by apologies, and they were generally treated as part of Scalia's judicial persona rather than violations of institutional norms.

Justice Thomas has made public statements about institutional critics and has been the subject of extensive ethics scrutiny over undisclosed gifts and travel, but has not issued public apologies to colleagues [20].

Ginsburg's 2016 Trump comments remain the closest analogue. Like Sotomayor, she issued a formal statement of regret. Like Sotomayor, the comments were made in a public appearance rather than a written opinion. Unlike Sotomayor, Ginsburg's target was a political candidate rather than a sitting colleague — a distinction that made the case for apology clearer under traditional judicial ethics principles [8].

What distinguishes Sotomayor's case is the combination of factors: a personal critique of a colleague's background, delivered in a public forum, about a case with active real-world consequences, followed by a formal apology through official Court channels. That sequence has no exact precedent.

What Comes Next

The apology closes one chapter but opens questions that the Court, Congress, and the public have not resolved. Should justices treat public appearances as extensions of the bench, bound by the same norms of impersonal legal reasoning? Or do they have an obligation to speak plainly about how their colleagues' backgrounds and blind spots shape the law?

The Court's 2023 code of conduct offers no clear answer. Pending legislation like the SCERT Act would create enforcement mechanisms but has little prospect of passage in the current Congress. And the underlying case — Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo and the "Kavanaugh stops" it enabled — continues to generate litigation, enforcement actions, and constitutional questions that the Court will likely revisit.

Sotomayor's three-sentence statement resolved an interpersonal dispute. The institutional tensions that produced it remain unresolved.