I hate click-bait, the headlines for on-line news articles that are designed less to elucidate the content of the article so that readers can make a more informed decision to spend their increasingly limited time (or free articles on a pay-wall site) to read it than to entice a potential reader to click the link and this generate more ad revenue. One recent example was a Newsweek article with the headline “Every Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sits Out Decision in Rare Move.”
It turns out that the particular case had three of the Supreme Court justices (Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson) as defendants, so there was no question that they had a conflict of interest. The case itself, Brunson v. Sotomayor, docket number 23-1073, was a frivolous sequel to Brunson v. Adams, docket number 22-380, itself frivolous and about which I have previously written, and the denial of certiorari to review the dismissal below was certainly the correct result. While I cannot say that this article was as misleading on the whole as the one I previously discussed, it does inaccurately state that the recusing justices did not provide a specific reason for doing so when the order specifically referenced “28 U. S. C. §455(b)(5)(i) and Code of Conduct for Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, Canon 3B(2)(d)(i) (party to the proceeding).”
Jay Bohn
May 30, 2024