Justice Sotomayor apologizes for highly personal criticism of Justice Kavanaugh.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor speaks at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, on Friday, March 28, 2025. Sotomayor issued a rare public apology on Wednesday, April 15, for criticizing a Supreme Court colleague, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in surprisingly personal terms during a public appearance last week. (Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times)

By ANN E. MARIMOW

Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a rare public apology earlier this week  for criticizing a Supreme Court colleague, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in surprisingly personal terms during a public appearance last week.

“I made remarks that were inappropriate,” Sotomayor said in a statement in response to questions from The New York Times and other media outlets. “I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.”

The highly unusual public mea culpa from a justice comes as the Supreme Court is entering the final stretch of a momentous term in which the justices are resolving a series of major cases testing President Donald Trump’s policy initiatives.

The controversy began at the University of Kansas Law School last Tuesday when the justice was asked about the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration — and specifically her blistering dissent to a temporary ruling the court issued in September permitting immigration-related stops in the Los Angeles area. Challengers of the policy had told the justices the stops involved “blatant racial profiling.”

The question provoked a strong response from Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina member. She suggested that a concurrence written by Kavanaugh in that case showed he was out of touch with the experiences of working-class people. He had emphasized that the majority was permitting “brief investigative stops.”

“There are some people who can’t understand our experiences, even when you tell them,” she said during the conversation with two Kansas alumnae, Judge Mary Murguia of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and her twin sister, Janet Murguia, the head of a Latino civil rights organization.

“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” the justice said, noting that even a brief interaction with law enforcement can have major consequences for a person’s job security and children.

“This is from a man whose parents were professionals and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour or the piece like I do,” she added.

Sotomayor did not mention Kavanaugh by name, but he was the only member of the majority who wrote to provide an explanation for the ruling on immigration stops.

He wrote that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion,” but “it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.” Kavanaugh subsequently clarified his opinion in a separate case, writing that “officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”

Sotomayor has often referred to her own life experiences and how those shaped her perspective, but the personal criticism of a colleague was unusual. It prompted an editorial from The Wall Street Journal titled “Justice Sonia Sotomayor Profiles Brett Kavanaugh.”

The two justices are graduates of Yale Law School, but their childhoods could not have been more different. Sotomayor grew up in public housing in the Bronx borough of New York City. Her father, who was a welder, died when she was 9, leaving her mother, a nurse, to raise her and her brother.

Kavanaugh grew up in Bethesda, a Maryland suburb of Washington, where his father was a trade association executive and his mother a prosecutor who later became a judge. But during his confirmation hearings in 2018, the justice spoke about his summer jobs in construction and cutting lawns, and the impact of his experience as a longtime volunteer serving meals to the homeless through Catholic Charities.

Kavanaugh did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday about his colleague’s apology.

At a separate appearance at the University of Alabama Law School last week, Sotomayor was asked about political divisions and how she builds bridges across ideological lines.

“I dissent so much, I’m not very successful,” replied the justice, who is the senior member of the court’s three-justice liberal wing.

In general, she said she did not define her colleagues by “their worst ideas” and instead looked for the best in them as human beings.

“With virtually all of them I certainly have a civil relationship,” Sotomayor said, “and with many of them, I dare say that I have a friendship.”