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Garrett Epps wrote a troubling column about Justice Alito rolling his eyes during Justice Ginsburg’s opinion announcement. Garrett observed:

At this point, Alito pursed his lips, rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and shook his head “no.” He looked for all the world like Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, signaling to the homies his contempt for Ray Walston as the bothersome history teacher, Mr. Hand.

This seems to be part of a string of behavior from Alito. Dana Milbank chronicled a string of eye-rolls.

Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court, was making her argument about how the majority opinion made it easier for sexual harassment to occur in the workplace when Alito, seated immediately to Ginsburg’s left, shook his head from side to side in disagreement, rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling.

His treatment of the 80-year-old Ginsburg, 17 years his elder and with 13 years more seniority, was a curious display of judicial temperament or, more accurately, judicial intemperance. Typically, justices state their differences in words — and Alito, as it happens, had just spoken several hundred of his own from the bench. But he frequently supplements words with middle-school gestures.

Days earlier, I watched as he demonstrated his disdain for Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the two other women on the court. Kagan, the newest justice, prefaced her reading of an opinion in a low-profile case by joking that it was “possibly not” the case the audience had come to hear. The audience responded with laughter, a few justices smiled — and Alito, seated at Kagan’s right elbow, glowered.

Another time, Sotomayor, reading a little-watched case about water rights, joked that “every student in the audience is going to look up the word ‘preemption’ today.” Alito rolled his eyes and shook his head.

Does anyone else have any info on these?

I was on a live broadcast of the 11:00 news, which does not seem to be online. I made it into this clip for about 10 seconds around 1:30.

Jack Balkin opines, with shoutouts to the scholarship of Mike Rappaport, David Upham, and others:

Affirmative Action and Original Meaning. Justices Scalia and Thomas once again argue for a strict colorblindness rule, but, once again, neither attempts to square their views with the original meaning of the Constitution. The closest Justice Thomas comes is citing to Clark v. Board of Directors, an Iowa Supreme Court decision from June 1868. The problem is that Clark construes the Iowa state constitution (not the federal Constitution), and it appears to have been decided before the Fourteenth Amendment was officially ratified in July 1868.

…

I am not sure that Mike is entirely successful in showing that colorblindness was required by the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, for reasons I will explain in a future post. There is just too much contrary evidence (for one thing, Thaddeus Stevens– the major proponent of that position–would have been turning cartwheels at the prospect, which he was most decidedly not doing). Moreover, the conclusion does not seem to square fully with Mike’s own approach to originalism, which looks to original methods and for a general consensus about what is protected by seemingly abstract rights provisions. But at least Mike is attempting to do the heavy lifting, and he should get kudos for that. Scalia and Thomas, by contrast, armed with very talented law clerks each Term, have not yet been willing to employ their favored method of interpretation to one of the most salient issues in contemporary constitutional law. Perhaps they will do so in the next case. Or perhaps they will simply continue to treat race as a very large exception to their originalist approach.

Mark Walsh’s View from the Court column has this nugget?

The Justices, court employees, and members of Suter’s family gathered earlier this month in the Upper Great Hall for the unveiling of a portrait of the Clerk.

Does anyone have a photo of this portrait? God speed General Suter!

We accurately predicted the outcomes in Fisher, Mutual, Kebodeaux, Nassar, and Vance, though the specific breakdown in Fisher was not foreseen. Out of 454  votes, only 34 (7%) predicted J. Sotomayor would reverse. Breyer was at 13.6% to reverse.

Here are the highlights of the remaining cases.

• Hollingsworth v. Perry – Do Petitioners Have Standing? – 68.5% Affirm (Yes, there is standing)
• Hollingsworth v. Perry – Does Prop 8 Violate the Equal Protection Clause? –  72.63% Affirm (Yes, it is unconstitutional)
• Shelby County v. Holder – 51.38% Reverse, 48.62% Affirm – This one is way too close to call.
• United States v. Windsor – Does Counsel for House of Representatives have Standing? 78% Affirm (Yes, there is standing)
• United States v. Windsor – Does DOMA violation the Equal Protection Component of the 5th Amendment or Federalism Principles? – 83.6% Affirm (Yes, it is unconstitutional)
• United States v. Windsor – Does SG’s agreement with 2nd Circuit deprive SCOTUS of jurisdiction – 78.6% Affirm (No, SCOTUS has jurisdiction)
• Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl – 62.37% Affirm, 36.48% Reverse
• Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District – 73.86%Affirm, 26.14% Reverse
• Sekhar v. U.S. – 58.54% Affirm, 41.46% Reverse