As the Supreme Court prepares to release its final, consequential opinions next week, attention is lingering on an unusually heated exchange during this week’s announcement session between Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
On Thursday, Alito read summaries from the bench of three major majority opinions he authored for the court’s six-justice conservative bloc. It is uncommon for a justice to announce multiple lengthy opinions from the bench, and even more unusual for the session to include the kind of public back-and-forth that followed one of those announcements.
The second opinion Alito announced addressed whether migrants may seek asylum by presenting themselves at designated ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border and asking for admission while their claims are processed. That procedure requires applicants to convince an asylum officer that their fear of persecution is credible. Alito’s opinion upheld the Trump administration’s policy of denying such applicants entry — a policy that had also been used by the Obama administration at times and that had been blocked by lower courts.
After Alito finished summarizing that decision, Sotomayor read a bench summary of her dissent. Rather than moving on to his next announcement, Alito paused and, making a face that observers compared to having ‘‘bitten into a lemon,’’ said, “There is much that I would have added to my bench statement had I known there would be a dissent read,” and offered a brief, unscripted rebuttal.
The moment stood out because it is not typical practice for a justice to be surprised by an oral dissent. Traditionally, a justice who plans to read a dissent from the bench notifies the chief justice and the author of the majority opinion in writing beforehand.
On Friday, the court’s public information office responded to an NPR inquiry with a short statement: “Justice Alito was notified in advance by Justice Sotomayor’s chambers that she would be reading a dissent from the bench. It was a misunderstanding on Justice Alito’s part.”
The exchange will likely be recalled as the court issues its remaining opinions, but the institution’s statement aims to put the incident down to a miscommunication rather than a breach of internal norms.