Colbert responded, explaining, to paraphrase from a different Stephen Colbert role, that this just sounds like racial profiling with extra steps.<\/a> Like an anger translator, he went where Sotomayor couldn\u2019t, calling out the practicalities of this decision and providing a dose of genuine common sense to counter Justice Gropey McKegger\u2019s concurrence where he described racial profiling as \u201ccommon sense.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n A post shared by The Late Show (@colbertlateshow)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n To a lawyer, Sotomayor\u2019s dissent conveyed the horror of watching the majority stitch together a constitutional fraud from duct tape and white panic. It concludes with \u201cI dissent.\u201d Normal people wouldn\u2019t bat an eye, but any dissent that leaves out the customary \u201crespectfully\u201d slaps the lawyerly reader like Will Smith at the Oscars. Within the genteel confines of the Supreme Court, that\u2019s a scorching burn. Outside of it, however, it passes without much notice.<\/p>\n On Colbert\u2019s couch, Sotomayor offered more polite disagreement, taking care to remind viewers that technically<\/em> the majority didn\u2019t authorize racial profiling because they included \u201clow-wage employment\u201d along with just vaguely looking Latino and speaking Spanish. Sotomayor noted that she personally didn\u2019t think this \u201cadds much to the equation,\u201d but she felt obliged to correct Colbert\u2019s description of the case as limited to how the person looks and talks.<\/p>\n In response, Colbert did what savvy non-lawyers are supposed to do in the face of lawyerly talk\u2019s inherent gaslighting: he called bullshit. Recognizing that the specifics of this case included this \u201clow-wage\u201d prong, but that the \u201cupshot\u201d of the decision is that law enforcement, going forward, can pick any number of flimsy fig leaves to throw into the racial profiling stew, and feel confident that the Supreme Court will have their back. Gorsuch recently ranted in a concurrence that lower court judges should treat these unsigned, unexplained shadow docket rulings as binding vibes. Even though these emergency petitions are meant as to provide temporary, stop-gap, case-specific relief until the full dispute can work its way though the courts, the conservative wing of the Court has seized on it as a fast track to jettison precedent they don\u2019t like. If you\u2019re a district court judge \u2014 given Gorsuch\u2019s commentary \u2014 the message is pretty clear that the Supreme Court expects future excuses to be rubberstamped below.<\/p>\n Nothing in the majority\u2019s fact pattern prevents this logic from metastasizing into blanket permission for cruising cities with the card from the Family Guy meme.<\/p>\n And, for what\u2019s worth, Colbert made a point of the fact that the supposedly \u201cfair\u201d addendum to the majority\u2019s defense boils down to \u201cpoor people presumptively have fewer rights.\u201d <\/p>\n But, despite what Gorsuch said, the law isn\u2019t supposed to work this way, and Sotomayor engages in this topic as if the law still worked the way they taught us in school. She disagrees that \u201clow-wage\u201d changes the nature of the claim, but responds as though this decision ends there. Colbert is the one forced to connect the dots.<\/p>\n The problem with relying on our comedians to traverse the fantasy is that they\u2019re too easily dismissed. The cynical will shrug off Colbert as a clown who \u201cdoesn\u2019t understand how the law works.\u201d Anyone posting this exchange and praising Colbert\u2019s straightforward take will be mocked, perhaps eliciting a snide, \u201ceven Sotomayor doesn\u2019t agree with him!\u201d And while they\u2019ll cast him as a joker, they clearly know the impact of a candid translation. That\u2019s why CBS worked out a merger approval with the Trump administration that conveniently<\/em> coincided with canceling Colbert and turning CBS News over to a right-wing grifter<\/a>. If the emperor has no clothes, make sure the networks are fully stocked with people willing to say \u201cclothes are woke.\u201d<\/p>\n Sotomayor might not be able to tell the public directly what\u2019s going on. If America comes out the other side of this, it\u2019s going to need institutional faith in the courts, and she\u2019s trying to keep that Tinkerbell from dying on stage. She\u2019s got a different role. She\u2019s writing the scathing \u2014 pointedly not \u201crespectfully\u201d issued \u2014 dissents for lawyers to consume. But lawyers, academics, and the broader legal intelligentsia need to take a hard look at what we\u2019re doing with those dissents. Sotomayor is primarily a baseball fan, but to borrow from other, much more interesting sports, she\u2019s doing her part and everyone else needs to step up to give her an assist.<\/p>\n The Court is signing off on shadow docket orders bulldozing constitutional rights with the same enthusiasm Donald Trump reserves for birthday cards to pedophiles<\/a> and somehow that needs to break through the attorney water cooler to the public at large. Law review articles that revel in the technicalities and nuances ain\u2019t getting the job done. No one reads those outside of the faculty lounge (and they\u2019re probably not reading them in the faculty lounge either). <\/p>\n So, yes, Stephen Colbert is right. He shouldn\u2019t have to be the one to say it. But until lawyers stop mistaking cocktail party cleverness for public clarity, the task of shouting \u201cthis is racist\u201d will fall to comedians.<\/p>\n Until they go off the air anyway. And then who remains to translate the stakes to the public? Okay, John Oliver, but then<\/em> who?<\/p>\n The post Justice Sotomayor Lets Stephen Colbert Say What She Can\u2019t<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Supreme Court\u2019s emperor has no clothes, and it takes a late-night comedian to point it out.<\/p>\n Sitting across from Stephen Colbert last night, Justice Sonia Sotomayor performed one of the more tragic rituals of America\u2019s constitutional law experiment. Asked about this week\u2019s decision in Noem v. Perdomo<\/a><\/em>, Sotomayor navigated a tricky path between standing by her powerful dissent while playing respectful toward a majority that has earned only contempt. <\/p>\n Colbert responded, explaining, to paraphrase from a different Stephen Colbert role, that this just sounds like racial profiling with extra steps.<\/a> Like an anger translator, he went where Sotomayor couldn\u2019t, calling out the practicalities of this decision and providing a dose of genuine common sense to counter Justice Gropey McKegger\u2019s concurrence where he described racial profiling as \u201ccommon sense.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n A post shared by The Late Show (@colbertlateshow)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n To a lawyer, Sotomayor\u2019s dissent conveyed the horror of watching the majority stitch together a constitutional fraud from duct tape and white panic. It concludes with \u201cI dissent.\u201d Normal people wouldn\u2019t bat an eye, but any dissent that leaves out the customary \u201crespectfully\u201d slaps the lawyerly reader like Will Smith at the Oscars. Within the genteel confines of the Supreme Court, that\u2019s a scorching burn. Outside of it, however, it passes without much notice.<\/p>\n On Colbert\u2019s couch, Sotomayor offered more polite disagreement, taking care to remind viewers that technically<\/em> the majority didn\u2019t authorize racial profiling because they included \u201clow-wage employment\u201d along with just vaguely looking Latino and speaking Spanish. Sotomayor noted that she personally didn\u2019t think this \u201cadds much to the equation,\u201d but she felt obliged to correct Colbert\u2019s description of the case as limited to how the person looks and talks.<\/p>\n In response, Colbert did what savvy non-lawyers are supposed to do in the face of lawyerly talk\u2019s inherent gaslighting: he called bullshit. Recognizing that the specifics of this case included this \u201clow-wage\u201d prong, but that the \u201cupshot\u201d of the decision is that law enforcement, going forward, can pick any number of flimsy fig leaves to throw into the racial profiling stew, and feel confident that the Supreme Court will have their back. Gorsuch recently ranted in a concurrence that lower court judges should treat these unsigned, unexplained shadow docket rulings as binding vibes. Even though these emergency petitions are meant as to provide temporary, stop-gap, case-specific relief until the full dispute can work its way though the courts, the conservative wing of the Court has seized on it as a fast track to jettison precedent they don\u2019t like. If you\u2019re a district court judge \u2014 given Gorsuch\u2019s commentary \u2014 the message is pretty clear that the Supreme Court expects future excuses to be rubberstamped below.<\/p>\n Nothing in the majority\u2019s fact pattern prevents this logic from metastasizing into blanket permission for cruising cities with the card from the Family Guy meme.<\/p>\n And, for what\u2019s worth, Colbert made a point of the fact that the supposedly \u201cfair\u201d addendum to the majority\u2019s defense boils down to \u201cpoor people presumptively have fewer rights.\u201d <\/p>\n But, despite what Gorsuch said, the law isn\u2019t supposed to work this way, and Sotomayor engages in this topic as if the law still worked the way they taught us in school. She disagrees that \u201clow-wage\u201d changes the nature of the claim, but responds as though this decision ends there. Colbert is the one forced to connect the dots.<\/p>\n The problem with relying on our comedians to traverse the fantasy is that they\u2019re too easily dismissed. The cynical will shrug off Colbert as a clown who \u201cdoesn\u2019t understand how the law works.\u201d Anyone posting this exchange and praising Colbert\u2019s straightforward take will be mocked, perhaps eliciting a snide, \u201ceven Sotomayor doesn\u2019t agree with him!\u201d And while they\u2019ll cast him as a joker, they clearly know the impact of a candid translation. That\u2019s why CBS worked out a merger approval with the Trump administration that conveniently<\/em> coincided with canceling Colbert and turning CBS News over to a right-wing grifter<\/a>. If the emperor has no clothes, make sure the networks are fully stocked with people willing to say \u201cclothes are woke.\u201d<\/p>\n Sotomayor might not be able to tell the public directly what\u2019s going on. If America comes out the other side of this, it\u2019s going to need institutional faith in the courts, and she\u2019s trying to keep that Tinkerbell from dying on stage. She\u2019s got a different role. She\u2019s writing the scathing \u2014 pointedly not \u201crespectfully\u201d issued \u2014 dissents for lawyers to consume. But lawyers, academics, and the broader legal intelligentsia need to take a hard look at what we\u2019re doing with those dissents. Sotomayor is primarily a baseball fan, but to borrow from other, much more interesting sports, she\u2019s doing her part and everyone else needs to step up to give her an assist.<\/p>\n The Court is signing off on shadow docket orders bulldozing constitutional rights with the same enthusiasm Donald Trump reserves for birthday cards to pedophiles<\/a> and somehow that needs to break through the attorney water cooler to the public at large. Law review articles that revel in the technicalities and nuances ain\u2019t getting the job done. No one reads those outside of the faculty lounge (and they\u2019re probably not reading them in the faculty lounge either). <\/p>\n So, yes, Stephen Colbert is right. He shouldn\u2019t have to be the one to say it. But until lawyers stop mistaking cocktail party cleverness for public clarity, the task of shouting \u201cthis is racist\u201d will fall to comedians.<\/p>\n Until they go off the air anyway. And then who remains to translate the stakes to the public? Okay, John Oliver, but then<\/em> who?<\/p>\n The post Justice Sotomayor Lets Stephen Colbert Say What She Can\u2019t<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Supreme Court\u2019s emperor has no clothes, and it takes a late-night comedian to point it out. Sitting across from Stephen Colbert last night, Justice Sonia Sotomayor performed one of the more tragic rituals of America\u2019s constitutional law experiment. Asked about this week\u2019s decision in Noem v. Perdomo, Sotomayor navigated a tricky path between standing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":133066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Headshot-300x200-Yyry4u.jpg?fit=300%2C200&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n
\nJoe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n