The death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia earlier this year caught the nation off guard, with some writing glowing eulogies for him. But one person who may not be sharing her fond memories of him is Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said she wanted to take a baseball bat to Scalia sometimes.
Scalia was known for his staunch conservative stance with fiery dissents being his calling card. His attitude annoyed many, except for maybe Clarence Thomas who would probably just looked stone-faced while Scalia went into one of his impassioned rants. No one may have been rankled more by his viewpoints than Sotomayor, who generally held viewpoints much more liberal than his. On Monday during a Q&A session at the University of Minnesota, Sotomayor said their differing mindsets could take their toll on her. She admitted, “There are things he’s said on the bench where if I had a baseball bat, I might have used it.”
Those are some pretty harsh words about her former colleague, even as he has passed on to the great beyond. Violent metaphors aside, she said during the session that although Scalia could rile her up, she stressed the importance of having differing viewpoints in the courts:
“If we’ve lost anything, it’s remembering that differences don’t stand, necessarily, on ill will. If you keep that in mind, you can resolve almost any issue, because you can find that common ground to interact with each other.”
In a time when bipartisanship has been thrown completely out the window, it’s refreshing to hear Sotomayor is still up for hearing other’s opinions.