In another devastating blow to the 4th Amendment, on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that evidence of an alleged crime can be used against a defendant even if police did something inappropriate or even illegal to obtain it.

This misstates the case. It is not about doing something illegal or inappropriate to obtain the evidence, but doing something which was not flagrant police misconduct, not with the purpose of obtaining the evidence ultimately obtained, but resulting in obtaining said evidence. The perp was arrested pursuant to an outstanding warrant and found in possession of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/14-1373_83i7.pdf

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

Syllabus

UTAH v. STRIEFF

CERTIORARI TO THE SUPREME COURT OF UTAH

No. 14–1373. Argued February 22, 2016—Decided June 20, 2016

Narcotics detective Douglas Fackrell conducted surveillance on a South Salt Lake City residence based on an anonymous tip about drug ac­tivity. The number of people he observed making brief visits to the house over the course of a week made him suspicious that the occu­pants were dealing drugs. After observing respondent Edward Strieff leave the residence, Officer Fackrell detained Strieff at a nearby parking lot, identifying himself and asking Strieff what he was doing at the house. He then requested Strieff’s identification and relayed the information to a police dispatcher, who informed him that Strieff had an outstanding arrest warrant for a traffic violation. Officer Fackrell arrested Strieff, searched him, and found methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. Strieff moved to suppress the evidence, ar­guing that it was derived from an unlawful investigatory stop. The trial court denied the motion, and the Utah Court of Appeals af­firmed. The Utah Supreme Court reversed, however, and ordered the evidence suppressed.

Held: The evidence Officer Fackrell seized incident to Strieff’s arrest is admissible based on an application of the attenuation factors from Brown v. Illinois, 422 U. S. 590. In this case, there was no flagrant police misconduct. Therefore, Officer Fackrell’s discovery of a valid, pre-existing, and untainted arrest warrant attenuated the connection between the unconstitutional investigatory stop and the evidenceseized incident to a lawful arrest. Pp. 4–10.

(a) As the primary judicial remedy for deterring Fourth Amendment violations, the exclusionary rule encompasses both the “primary evidence obtained as a direct result of an illegal search or seizure”and, relevant here, “evidence later discovered and found to be derivative of an illegality.” Segura v. United States, 468 U. S. 796, 804. But to ensure that those deterrence benefits are not outweighed by the rule’s substantial social costs, there are several exceptions to the rule. One exception is the attenuation doctrine, which provides for admissibility when the connection between unconstitutional police conduct and the evidence is sufficiently remote or has been interrupted by some intervening circumstance. See Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U. S. 586, 593. Pp. 4–5.

(b) As a threshold matter, the attenuation doctrine is not limited to the defendant’s independent acts. The doctrine therefore applies here, where the intervening circumstance is the discovery of a valid, pre-existing, and untainted arrest warrant. Assuming, without deciding, that Officer Fackrell lacked reasonable suspicion to stop Strieff initially, the discovery of that arrest warrant attenuated theconnection between the unlawful stop and the evidence seized from Strieff incident to his arrest. Pp. 5–10.

(1) Three factors articulated in Brown v. Illinois, 422 U. S. 590, lead to this conclusion. The first, “temporal proximity” between the initially unlawful stop and the search, id., at 603, favors suppressing the evidence. Officer Fackrell discovered drug contraband on Strieff only minutes after the illegal stop. In contrast, the second factor, “the presence of intervening circumstances, id., at 603–604, strongly favors the State. The existence of a valid warrant, predating the investigation and entirely unconnected with the stop, favors finding sufficient attenuation between the unlawful conduct and the discovery of evidence. That warrant authorized Officer Fackrell to arrest Strieff, and once the arrest was authorized, his search of Strieff incident to that arrest was undisputedly lawful. The third factor, “the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct,” id., at 604, also strongly favors the State. Officer Fackrell was at most negligent, but his errors in judgment hardly rise to a purposeful or flagrant violation of Strieff’s Fourth Amendment rights. After the unlawful stop, his conduct was lawful, and there is no indication that the stop was part of any systemic or recurrent police misconduct. Pp. 6–9.

(2) Strieff’s counterarguments are unpersuasive. First, neither Officer Fackrell’s purpose nor the flagrancy of the violation rises to a level of misconduct warranting suppression. Officer Fackrell’s purpose was not to conduct a suspicionless fishing expedition but was to gather information about activity inside a house whose occupants were legitimately suspected of dealing drugs. Strieff conflates the standard for an illegal stop with the standard for flagrancy, which requires more than the mere absence of proper cause. Second, it is unlikely that the prevalence of outstanding warrants will lead to dragnet searches by police. Such misconduct would expose police to civil liability and, in any event, is already accounted for by Brown’s “purpose and flagrancy” factor. Pp. 9–10.

2015 UT 2, 357 P. 3d 532, reversed.

THOMAS, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and KENNEDY, BREYER, and ALITO, JJ., joined. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GINSBURG, J., joined as to Parts I, II, and III. KAGAN, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GINSBURG, J., joined.

Given the hard-mindedness of Republicans on all matters, and given their refusal to follow Trump, it looks as though we're going to have a half- century or more of Democrat rule and Democrat control of the Court.

So, while your opinion of this holds for the instant, it will no longer be the case two years hence. By then, there will be a Democrat majority Supreme Court that will cut away all of this rather aggressively pro-police law.

You will do well to start to reposition your mind on such subjects, because if you don't, you will find yourself constantly at odds with the Supreme Court jurisprudence that will be the law for most, if not all, of the remainder of your life.

Agorist claimed, "The Supreme Court ruled that evidence of an alleged crime can be used against a defendant even if police did something inappropriate or even illegal to obtain it."

The Court stated,

That warrant authorized Officer Fackrell to arrest Strieff, and once the arrest was authorized, his search of Strieff incident to that arrest was undisputedly lawful. The third factor, “the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct,” id., at 604, also strongly favors the State. Officer Fackrell was at most negligent, but his errors in judgment hardly rise to a purposeful or flagrant violation of Strieff’s Fourth Amendment rights.

SCOTUS found that the arrest was incident to an outstanding arrest warrant.

One may disagree with what SCOTUS found, but they did not find what Agorist claimed they did.

nolu --- It will go better for you in your life if you come to Sotomayor's position, because that is where the current will flow. --- Vicomte13

He already AGREES with her on many liberal positions.

She was a pretty good judge in New York.

Enjoy your trip on the road to serfdom..

Serfdom?

My ancestors were noble lords of France for 800 years. I have always been a member of the aristocracy, and I always will be. Serfdom is not in my blood.

That said, I do happen to give a damn about the peasants. I know from my past where the path we are on leads, for after serfdom comes revolution, which scythes down a generation of all classes and castes, irrespective of sex, age and morality.

To avoid that, we must do what is right.

Serfdom? --- My ancestors were noble lords of France for 800 years. I have always been a member of the aristocracy, and I always will be. Serfdom is not in my blood.

Enjoy your trip into dementia then...

Enjoy your trip into dementia then...

I'll look you up when I get there.

Now, police need not understand the law, or even abide by the law — to enforce the law. In what world is this considered acceptable?

Between Trumps eventual presidential win, this USSC ruling and the fact that as long as you breathe, there will always be a WOD's, you probably should end it all with a lead overdose. 168 grains ingested by way of mouth will do the trick

Fair enough. It will go better for you in your life if you come to Sotomayor's position, because that is where the current will flow.

If Hillary is elected, that is where the current may flow. Justice Kagan may be the more influential justice. Justice Sotomayor will make an historic asterisk in Supreme Court history unless Hillary can appoint more such Living Constitution activists.

God help us all if the current flows to Justice Sotomayor. Considering the chasm between Justice Sotomayor and myself, I can't get there from here and am not inspired to try. Some of her sources make Obama appear conservative.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE GINSBURG joins as to Parts I, II, and III, dissenting.

The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights.

The case before the Court in Strieff was not a prosecution of the officer for violation of the rights of Strieff. The Court could neither find him guilty nor innocent of a crime, nor forgive him for a crime. The case before the Court involved the applicability of the judge-made exclusionary rule to the evidence found on the person of Strieff.

Justice Sotomayor strives to make this a case about Fourth Amendment rights, but it is a case about the applicability of the judge-made exclusionary rule. “[W]hether the exclusionary sanction is appropriately imposed in a particular case...is ‘an issue separate from the question whether the Fourth Amendment rights of the party seeking to invoke the rule were violated by police conduct.’” Hudson, infra.

[Justice Sotomayor] This “exclusionary rule” removes an incentive for officers to search us without proper justification. Terry, 392 U. S., at 12.

This bit of legal legerdemain steathily slips in an allusion that the search of Strieff was without proper justification. However, the search was made only following knowledge of the outstanding arrest warrant, and the arrest of Strieff pursuant to that warrant.

Having executed a lawful arrest of Strieff, and taken him into custody, it was necessary for the officer to search Strieff. Strieff should have received another search at the delivery point.

Would Sotomayor rule that the officer, having been informed of the outstanding arrest warrant, was prohibited from arresting Strieff and taking him into custody?

If Sotomayor would rule that the arrest and taking into custody was lawful and required, would she rule that the officer was prohibited from searching Strieff incident to the arrest and taking into custody?

Would Justice Sotomayor rule that any search of Strieff at the jail would be prohibited as unlawful?

At issue is whether the search was lawfully conducted pursuant to the outstanding arrest warrant, or whether it was conducted pursuant to an unlawful stop, and the search was unlawful.

No other justice joined Sotomayor's dissent section IV. Ginsburg joined other parts, Kagan joined none of it. It may be relevant that, as senior dissenting justice, Justice Ginsburg would have assigned the writing of the primary dissenting opinion. The opinion of Justice Kagan, joined by Justice Ginsburg, may be the primary dissenting opinion. Also, for what it is worth, Justice Kagan wrote her 1983 Master's Thesis at Oxford University on The Development and Erosion of the American Exclusionary Rule: A Study in Judicial Method. Justice Kagan's dissent, joined by Justice Ginsburg, is the more professional, reasoned, and effective opinion.

Section IV is where Justice Sotomayor really goes off the deep end and starts:

Writing only for myself, and drawing on my professional experiences, I would add that unlawful "stops" have severe consequences much greater than the inconvenience sug­gested by the name.

The Justice should write about the instant case, the evidence in the case. Her professional experiences, whatever they may be, are not part of the case.

Justice Sotomayor invokes Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, and W.E.B. DuBois and Te-Nehisi Coates. These folks are not exactly mainstream.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lani_Guinier

Guinier is probably best known as President Bill Clinton's nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in April 1993.

President Clinton withdrew his nomination in June 1993, following a wave of negative press that was brought on by her controversial writings, some of which even Clinton himself called "anti-democratic" and "very difficult to defend".

http://www.americanexperiment.org/article/lani-guinier-reconsidered/

Lani Guinier Reconsidered

John H. Hinderaker and Scott W. Johnson

Center of the American Experiment Minneapolis, Minnesota August 1993

[...]

Faced with the intractable fact that blacks are, after all, a minority, Guinier reacts — with a logical consistency that borders on monomania — by attacking democracy and majority rule. In a country like America, where we have “subjugated minorities,”18 Guinier declares majority rule to be “illegitimate.”19 She is careful to say that she does not necessarily oppose majority rule in all places and in all circumstances: “For the sake of argument, I am prepared for the moment to assume that, under certain conditions, majority rule may be possible.”²⁰ Only not in America. Here, “we ought to question the inherent legitimacy of winner-take-all majority rule.”²¹

Thus, Guinier proposes to go beyond quotas, to a system that “is not satisfied by proportionate election of members of a protected class.”²² Instead, she advocates what she calls “proportionate interest representation.”²³ Under this theory, each statutorily protected minority group “has a right to have its interests satisfied a fair proportion of the time.”²⁴ Or, stated another way, “disadvantaged and stigmatized minority groups [would] also have a fair chance to have their policy preferences satisfied.”²⁵ The anti-democratic implications of Guinier’s proposal are astonishing: Each ethnic group has a right to have “its” views adopted by legislatures and other deliberative bodies a “fair proportion” of the time, even though the position in question is rejected by the majority.

In order to implement such a scheme, Guinier, like all liberals with anti-democratic agendas, turns to the federal courts. She argues that the Voting Rights Act should be interpreted to empower the federal courts to review the substantive decisions of every legislature, every school board, every city council, and every other elected body in every jurisdiction subject to the Act. The courts would determine whether black “interests,” as defined by their “authentic” representatives, had prevailed in each such body a “fair proportion” of the time. (Guinier never addresses the question of what constitutes a “fair proportion.”) If not, racism would be conclusively presumed. The fact that the majority has an honest disagreement with the minority — for example, because the majority does not share a commitment to Guinier’s “redistributive agenda” — would be no defense.

If the court finds that “authentic” blacks have not had their “policy preferences satisfied” a “fair proportion” of the time, Guinier advocates a panoply of remedies. The federal court could dictate that the state, county or municipality scrap its traditional voting system. A variety of other systems could be substituted in its place; Guinier’s favored remedy appears to be a version of the “at large” system which she denounced as recently as 1989, modified so that each voter would cast more than one vote. Despite Guinier’s long and largely incoherent explanations of this system, it is impossible to see how it would transform a black minority into a majority.

See also:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1993/05/25/lani-guinier-radical-justice/1b4d4e4d-30d1-47d1-b1ab-cb5c77125987/

LANI GUINIER: RADICAL JUSTICE

By Lally Weymouth
Washington Post
May 25, 1993

Justice Sotomayor invokes W.E.B. DuBois.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._E._B._Du_Bois

Communism

Du Bois was bitterly disappointed that many of his colleagues – particularly the NAACP – did not support him during his 1951 PIC trial, whereas working class whites and blacks supported him enthusiastically. After the trial, Du Bois lived in Manhattan, writing and speaking, and continuing to associate primarily with leftist acquaintances. His primary concern was world peace, and he railed against military actions, such as the Korean War, which he viewed as efforts by imperialist whites to maintain colored people in a submissive state.

In 1950, at the age of 82, Du Bois ran for U.S. Senator from New York on the American Labor Party ticket and received about 200,000 votes, or 4% of the statewide total. Du Bois continued to believe that capitalism was the primary culprit responsible for the subjugation of colored people around the world, and therefore – although he recognized the faults of the Soviet Union – he continued to uphold communism as a possible solution to racial problems.

Justice Sotomayor invokes Te-Nahisi Coates.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

The Case for Reparations

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Te-Nehisi Coates
The Atlantic
June 2014 Issue

[excerpt - pdf version 63 pp.]

Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’?”

A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004. Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

Regarding the legal observations of Justice Sotomayor:

Justice Sotomayor invokes Terry thus,

Regardless of your answer, he may order you to stand "helpless, perhaps facing a wall with [your] hands raised." Terry, 392 U. S., at 17. If the officer thinks you might be dangerous, he may then "frisk" you for weapons. This involves more than just a pat down. As onlookers pass by, the officer may " 'feel with sensitive fingers every portion of [your] body. A thorough search [may] be made of [your] arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and area about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet.'" Id, at 17, n. 13.

Terry, 392 US 1 (1968) observed,

The heart of the Fourth Amendment, the argument runs, is a severe requirement of specific justification for any intrusion upon protected personal security, coupled with a highly developed system of judicial controls to enforce upon the agents of the State the commands of the Constitution. Acquiescence by the courts in the compulsion inherent in the field interrogation practices at issue here, it is urged, would constitute an abdication of judicial control over, and indeed an encouragement of, substantial interference with liberty and personal security by police officers whose judgment is necessarily colored by their primary involvement in "the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime." Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10, 14 (1948). This, it is argued, can only serve to exacerbate police-community tensions in the crowded centers of our Nation's cities.

In this context, we approach the issues in this case mindful of the limitations of the judicial function in controlling the myriad daily situations in which policemen and citizens confront each other on the street. The State has characterized the issue here as "the right of a police officer . . . to make an on-the-street stop, interrogate and pat down for weapons (known in street vernacular as 'stop and frisk'). [Footnote 8]" But this is only partly accurate. For the issue is not the abstract propriety of the police conduct, but the admissibility against petitioner of the evidence uncovered by the search and seizure.

And Terry concluded with,

V

We conclude that the revolver seized from Terry was properly admitted in evidence against him. At the time he seized petitioner and searched him for weapons, Officer McFadden had reasonable grounds to believe that petitioner was armed and dangerous, and it was necessary for the protection of himself and others to take swift measures to discover the true facts and neutralize the threat of harm if it materialized. The policeman carefully restricted his search to what was appropriate to the discovery of the particular items which he sought. Each case of this sort will, of course, have to be decided on its own facts. We merely hold today that, where a police officer observes unusual conduct which leads him reasonably to conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot and that the persons with whom he is dealing may be armed and presently dangerous, where, in the course of investigating this behavior, he identifies himself as a policeman and makes reasonable inquiries, and where nothing in the initial stages of the encounter serves to dispel his reasonable fear for his own or others' safety, he is entitled for the protection of himself and others in the area to conduct a carefully limited search of the outer clothing of such persons in an attempt to discover weapons which might be used to assault him.

Such a search is a reasonable search under the Fourth Amendment, and any weapons seized may properly be introduced in evidence against the person from whom they were taken.

Affirmed.

A Terry search is constitutional, per the Court, despite Justice Sotomayor's recited list of horribles.

See also, Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U.S. 586 (2005), Opinion of the Court:

In Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383 (1914), we adopted the federal exclusionary rule for evidence that was unlawfully seized from a home without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment. We began applying the same rule to the States, through the Fourteenth Amendment, in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643 (1961).

Suppression of evidence, however, has always been our last resort, not our first impulse. The exclusionary rule generates “substantial social costs,” United States v. Leon, 468 U. S. 897, 907 (1984), which sometimes include setting the guilty free and the dangerous at large. We have therefore been “cautio[us] against expanding” it, Colorado v. Connelly, 479 U. S. 157, 166 (1986), and “have repeatedly emphasized that the rule’s ‘costly toll’ upon truth-seeking and law enforcement objectives presents a high obstacle for those urging [its] application,” Pennsylvania Bd. of Probation and Parole v. Scott, 524 U. S. 357, 364–365 (1998). We have rejected “[i]ndiscriminate application” of the rule, Leon, supra, at 908, and have held it to be applicable only “where its remedial objectives are thought most efficaciously served,” United States v. Calandra, 414 U. S. 338, 348 (1974)—that is, “where its deterrence benefits outweigh its ‘substantial social costs,’” Scott, supra, at 363 (quoting Leon, supra, at 907).

We did not always speak so guardedly. Expansive dicta in Mapp, for example, suggested wide scope for the exclusionary rule. See, e. g., 367 U. S., at 655 (“[A]ll evidence obtained by searches and seizures in violation of the Constitution is, by that same authority, inadmissible in a state court”). Whiteley v. Warden, Wyo. State Penitentiary, 401 U. S. 560, 568–569 (1971), was to the same effect. But we have long since rejected that approach. As explained in Arizona v. Evans, 514 U. S. 1, 13 (1995): “In Whiteley, the Court treated identification of a Fourth Amendment violation as synonymous with application of the exclusionary rule to evidence secured incident to that violation. Subsequent case law has rejected this reflexive application of the exclusionary rule.” (Citation omitted.) We had said as much in Leon, a decade earlier, when we explained that “[w]hether the exclusionary sanction is appropriately imposed in a particular case...is ‘an issue separate from the question whether the Fourth Amendment rights of the party seeking to invoke the rule were violated by police conduct.’” 468 U. S., at 906 (quoting Illinois v. Gates, 462 U. S. 213, 223 (1983)).

In other words, exclusion may not be premised on the mere fact that a constitutional violation was a “but-for” cause of obtaining evidence. Our cases show that but-for causality is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for suppression. In this case, of course, the constitutional violation of an illegal manner of entry was not a but-for cause of obtaining the evidence. Whether that preliminary misstep had occurred or not, the police would have executed the warrant they had obtained, and would have discovered the gun and drugs inside the house. But even if the illegal entry here could be characterized as a but-for cause of discovering what was inside, we have “never held that evidence is ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ simply because ‘it would not have come to light but for the illegal actions of the police.’” Segura v. United States, 468 U. S. 796, 815 (1984). See also id., at 829 (Stevens, J., dissenting) (“We have not . . . mechanically applied the [exclusionary] rule to every item of evidence that has a causal connection with police misconduct”). Rather, but-for cause, or “causation in the logical sense alone,” United States v. Ceccolini, 435 U. S. 268, 274 (1978), can be too attenuated to justify exclusion, id., at 274–275. Even in the early days of the exclusionary rule, we declined to

“hold that all evidence is ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ simply because it would not have come to light but for the illegal actions of the police. Rather, the more apt question in such a case is ‘whether, granting establishment of the primary illegality, the evidence to which instant objection is made has been come at by exploitation of that illegality or instead by means sufficiently distinguishable to be purged of the primary taint.’” Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U. S. 471, 487–488 (1963) (quoting J. Maguire, Evidence of Guilt 221 (1959); emphasis added).

If Clinton, then Sotomayor's theories will be the dominant strain of Supreme Court jurisprudence for decades.

If Trump, then Scalia's will. Trump has already told us who he will appoint. Because the Supreme Court is the most powerful political body in America, that's what I really think this election is about: control of the Supreme Court (for domestic policy) and relations with Russia (for foreign policy).

All else is detail.

As always, then, everything comes down to power. Which means, in the present instance, that everything comes down to whether the next President is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

If Clinton, then Sotomayor's theories will be the dominant strain of Supreme Court jurisprudence for decades.

While liberal theories would certainly be the dominant strain of Supreme Court jurisprudence, I have doubts that Justice Sotomayor can attract majorities for her more extreme viewpoints. I would more expect to see Justice Kagan become the dominant liberal justice.

In the grand scheme of things, conservative jurisprudence would still go on hiatus for a few decades.