Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the nation has lost its sense of public civility – but confessed she sometimes wanted to take a baseball bat to conservative jurist Antonin Scalia.
Answering questions at a University of Minnesota lecture series Monday, the 2009 President Barack Obama appointee deflected taking sides in the tumultuous presidential race – but encouraged people to understand divergent points of view, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reports.
"If we've lost anything, it's remembering that differences don't stand, necessarily, on ill will," she said. "If you keep that in mind, you can resolve almost any issue, because you can find that common ground to interact with each other."
Sotomayor also spoke fondly of Scalia, saying his sudden death in February was like losing a family member, despite their different opinions on the bench.
"There are things he's said on the bench where if I had a baseball bat, I might have used it," she said.
She also quipped as a trial judge, she tolerated mistakes by lawyers, but drew the line at laziness or lack of preparation.
"I think I suffer fools easily," she said, eliciting laughs from the students, the Pioneer Press reported. "You know where I sit, right?"
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.