Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has urged people to read the court’s opinions, cover to cover, as she said it’s vital to understanding how and why the justices arrived at their decisions. Her plea to the country came shortly after that same court allowed controversial immigration stops to continue in Los Angeles.
Sotomayor appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Tuesday night to promote her new children’s book “Just Shine! How to be a Better You,” when she made the request. She said it after Colbert read a section of her most recent opinion, dissenting against allowing immigration stops based on individuals’ ethnicity or occupations to resume in Los Angeles.
The studio audience gave Sotomayor, who’s considered a liberal judge, a standing ovation after Colbert read the excerpt.
She joked that people don’t necessarily need to read the most recent opinion that gave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leeway to conduct roving stops. The case hit the Supreme Court’s emergency docket as plaintiffs argued the stops were based on racial profiling, claiming they violate the Fourth Amendment.
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“I want you to read it, and I want you to read the concurring opinion,” Sotomayor told Colbert. “Too many people hear what the Supreme Court decision is, and they come to immediate conclusions based on what are only their personal feelings.”
It’s not just the general public whom she wanted to self-educate on Supreme Court decisions, but also lawyers themselves. She told Colbert she has attended conventions where only a handful of attorneys said they’ve read an opinion in its entirety. Justice Amy Coney Barrett has encouraged people to do the same since she joined the bench.
SCOTUS takes cases because judges across the nation are split and request the top court’s help to define laws, Sotomayor said. She and Barrett had joint appearances in early 2024, where they noted the Supreme Court is the place where ideological differences can be debated without anger, a model they said the rest of the country should follow.
“We are there to resolve differences of opinions among the courts in the U.S.,” Sotomayor told Colbert.
People typically read just headlines
The two justices’ push reflected what Pennsylvania State University researchers found in a study: A majority of social media users don’t read past news headlines.
Researchers analyzed more than 35 million posts that had links shared extensively on Facebook between 2017 and 2020. They found that about 75% of the shares were made without people clicking the link first. That happened more often for politically charged content than politically neutral stories. The study involved reviewing 8,000 hyperlinks, 2,969 of which had false content.
“I had assumed that if someone shared something, they read and thought about it, that they’re supporting or even championing the content,” S. Shyam Sundar, the lead author of the study and Penn State media effects professor, told the university in November. “You might expect that maybe a few people would occasionally share content without thinking it through, but for most shares to be like this? That was a surprising, very scary finding.”
He suggested that platforms implement a warning about sharing content that may be false and require users to acknowledge the statement before hitting “post.” But properly vetting what is shared, he added, is the responsibility of the user.
“The reason this happens may be because people are just bombarded with information and are not stopping to think through it,” Sundar said. “In such an environment, misinformation has more of a chance of going viral.”
Reading opposing opinions would give people a perspective Sotomayor said they may not have thought about, or see logical points made.
Barrett has been on a similar publicity campaign to Sotomayor’s, promoting her memoir and trying to give people a better look into how the Supreme Court thinks. In her book, Barrett said her brother followed the advice of reading the opinion when the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the federal right to an abortion came out, CNN reported.
She wrote that the decision wasn’t at the top of her list of things to discuss during her 2022 vacation, as justices faced threats and investigations related to the leaked memo. But she embraced her brother in a hug.
“You as citizens: Read the decisions,” Sotomayor said. “Don’t wait on news reports.”
