Reacting to reporting that Justice Sonia Sotomayor took 15 minutes to read a scathing dissent with the court's conservative majority's ruling on birthright citizenship, legal analyst Melissa Murray pointed to a change in courtroom demeanor.
"I understand that Justice Sotomayor, still reading her dissent from the bench," MSNBC host Ana Cabrera prompted her guest. "We also have a dissent from Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson who writes in her dissent the court's decision to permit the executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is 'an existential threat to the rule of law.'"
"Melissa, your thoughts on just the emotion that we are seeing triggered in this particular ruling?" she asked .
"Well, it seems very clear, Anna, that tempers are high on both sides, on both Justice Sotomayor and Justice Jackson dissenting; Justice Sotomayor choosing to read her dissent from the bench," Murray replied. "That's not something that always happens; they reserve that for the most forceful dissents in the cases that they think matter the most."
"But she is basically into a 15-minute read here, which is one of the longest public dissents that she has made. So she clearly thinks this is really important, and it is likely that we may see something from Justice Jackson as well," she continued. "And also the cross exchanges between the justices here show that tempers are short on this court. The clip that Julia earlier read from Justice Jackson, from Justice Barrett about Justice Jackson, it's a little short, a little jarring in its tone. It's not typically what you would expect from life tenured colleagues."
"But it seems clear that at least on this issue, there was a lot of disagreement on this court, a lot of disagreement about the impact of the court's decision here, and whether or not this would truly give rise to a failure of rule of law systems," she suggested. "Justice Barrett says that this is only about stopping an imperial judiciary. Justice Jackson saying, no, this is about stopping an imperial executive that is moving very quickly toward something that looks more like autocracy."
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