Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from their colleagues’ refusal to hear a race discrimination case Monday, in a dispute that also tells a bigger story about the current state of the high court.
The rejected petition came from adult entertainer Chanel Nicholson, who performed at clubs in Houston. She brought a lawsuit claiming that the clubs had engaged in race discrimination. An appeals court said her claims were barred because they fell outside the statute of limitations. But in her dissent, which was joined by Sotomayor, Jackson wrote that the lower court ruling “flouts this Court’s clear precedents.”
It takes four justices to grant review. On a court with six Republican appointees and three Democratic appointees, liberal-leaning petitions are all but doomed, saying nothing of how a majority of the court would rule if review were granted.
Nicholson’s case is also the latest example of a case not even garnering all three Democratic appointees’ interest, with Justice Elena Kagan not joining the dissent.
But Nicholson’s case is also the latest example of a case not even garnering all three Democratic appointees’ interest, with Justice Elena Kagan not joining the dissent. That’s not a new phenomenon — Jackson and Sotomayor have spoken out on their own plenty before, without Kagan — but it reinforces a split within the Democratic appointees’ priorities.
We saw a split among Republican appointees play out in a separate case Monday, when a Second Amendment appeal fell just short of getting four votes. In that case, however, a statement from Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the right to bear assault weapons could land on the high court docket soon. Yet, when it comes to an appeal like the one Jackson and Sotomayor flagged, it’s not a matter of time but a matter of the court’s composition. Indeed, the two Democratic appointees didn’t just say they wanted the discrimination appeal to be reviewed but that they wanted to summarily reverse the lower court’s ruling. That generally takes six votes, showing how much further out of reach their judicial goals are in this case and others. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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