It would be irresponsible to speculate as to whether Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had grown envious of her colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Internet celebrity. (The octogenarian Ginsburg was been widely feted as the “Notorious RBG,” and there’s even a popular line of t-shirts that sports her scowling visage.) But whatever her motives, Justice Sotomayor has definitively grabbed the crown from Ginsburg and now reigns as the Internet left’s favorite Supreme Court justice.
Earlier this week, Justice Sotomayor released a dissent to a 5-3 ruling on a Fourth Amendment case. The case stemmed from a drug arrest in Utah that may have resulted from an illegal search. (The Court’s majority disagreed that the search invalidated the conviction.)
Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was greeted with the rapture usually reserved for John Oliver videos. “Sonia Sotomayor’s Epic Dissent Shows Why We Need People of Color on the Supreme Court,” enthused The Nation. The Week urged its readers to explore “Sonia Sotomayor’s devastating defense of civil liberties. “Sonia Sotomayor just showed the value of having a ‘wise Latina’ on the court,” enthused The New Republic, whileSlate gushed over Sotomayor’s “atomic bomb of a dissent slamming racial profiling and mass imprisonment.”
Most of these articles, naturally, were thin on any legal analysis: They failed to demonstrate that Sotomayor was, well, right, and that the majority decision was wrong. But most did take care to note Sotomayor cited James Baldwin in her dissent, as well that darling of liberal click-bait, the Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Justice Ginsburg needs to step up now if she wants to regain her place as the coolest justice. Perhaps she can embed a Samantha Bee video in her next dissent.
