The three liberals have managed to align with varying conservative justices to build ideologically scrambled majorities in technical cases involving overtime pay, nursing home abuses, the federal prosecution of a Turkish bank and a dispute over a roadway easement. Much of the liberals’ incremental success has come in the dustier corners of the court’s docket. (In a second, more significant case, involving protections for wetlands, she and the other liberals concurred in the court’s bottom-line result, but their concurrence is more naturally read as a functional dissent because they disagreed sharply with the legal rule that the majority adopted.) But this term, she has formally dissented in only one case, an arcane dispute about regulations of foreign bank accounts. At this point last term, Sotomayor had already dissented 16 times. On the other side, there is Sotomayor, the senior member of the liberal bloc that also includes Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Brackeen, a 7-2 decision in which the court upheld a federal law that gives preference to Native American families in the adoption of Native children.īoth decisions drew sharp dissents from Thomas and Alito. Milligan, a stunning 5-4 decision in which Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the three liberals in favor of Black voters suing Alabama under the Voting Rights Act, and Haaland v. Somin was referring to decisions earlier this month in Allen v. “In addition, the six-justice conservative majority has internal disagreements on some key issues, as cases like Milligan and Haaland demonstrate.” “This term so far reinforces the point that not all cases - not even all important cases - split the justices along right-left lines,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University. In the meantime, though, the court’s three-member liberal bloc has notched surprising victories in a number of small cases and a few big ones, too – much to the chagrin of the court’s conservative flank. Liberals have spent months bracing for this June to be the sequel. Bowie noted that, just two years ago, some pundits described the court as a minimalist body fractured “3-3-3” - a view that did not age well when, last June, the conservative majority jolted the law to the right on abortion, guns, religion and climate change. Some or all of those cases may soon become the newest milestones for the court’s vaunted 6-3 conservative supermajority. Also pending are important cases about Biden’s immigration policy and the ability of state legislatures to run elections with little judicial oversight. Before departing for its customary summer recess, the court is expected to announce whether colleges can continue to use affirmative action, whether President Joe Biden has the authority to cancel student debt and whether certain businesses have a right to refuse services for same-sex weddings.
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