Sotomayor Cites Breyer’s “Making Our Democracy Work” Twice

April 22nd, 2014

This citation jumped out in Schuette!

The Court remained true to its command in Brown. In Arkansas, for example, it enforced a desegregation order against the Little Rock school board. Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U. S. 1, 5 (1958). On the very day the Court announced that ruling, the Arkansas Legislature responded by chang- ing the rules. It enacted a law permitting the Governor to close any public school in the State, and stripping local school districts of their decisionmaking authority so long as the Governor determined that local officials could not maintain “‘a general, suitable, and efficient educational system.’ ” Aaron v. Cooper, 261 F. 2d 97, 99 (CA8 1958) (per curiam) (quoting Arkansas statute). The then- Governor immediately closed all of Little Rock’s high schools. Id., at 99–100; see also S. Breyer, Making Our Democracy Work 49–67 (2010) (discussing the events in Little Rock).

Has a Justice ever cited a book authored by another Justice in an opinion? Particularly when the cited author joined the majority, and the citing Justice is in dissent?

Update: You ask, twitter shall give. Adam White with the answer:

Update 2: On page 100 out of 108, she cites Breyer again.

It also claims that “the statistics in California across the 17 campuses in the University of California system show that today the un- derrepresented minority percentage is better on 16 out of those 17 campuses”—all except Berkeley—than before California’s equivalent initiative took effect. Id., at 16. As it turns out, these statistics weren’t “‘even good enough to be wrong.’ ” Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence 4 (2d ed. 2000) (Introduction by Stephen G. Breyer (quoting Wolfgang Pauli)).