Justice Elena Kagan erupted at Justice Sonia Sotomayor in the days following the leaked draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization opinion, screaming so loudly behind closed doors that a nearby person said "the wall was shaking," Fox News reported, citing a forthcoming book on the Supreme Court.
The confrontation, described in CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic's upcoming book "The Bubble: The Nine Worlds of the Supreme Court Justices," paints a picture of a liberal wing in crisis after the May 2022 leak of Justice Samuel Alito's majority draft overturning Roe v. Wade. Kagan was furious at Sotomayor not over the substance of the opinion itself, but over what she saw as Sotomayor's role in provoking the conservative majority into going further than it might otherwise have gone.
Biskupic's account places the screaming match in the period immediately after Politico published the draft opinion on May 2, 2022. Kagan believed Sotomayor's aggressive rhetorical approach during internal deliberations had backfired, hardening the conservative justices' resolve and helping push the final opinion toward a full reversal of Roe rather than a narrower ruling.
The book claims Kagan had tried to find a middle path. She reportedly worked behind the scenes to persuade Chief Justice John Roberts to join a narrower opinion that would have upheld Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban without overturning Roe entirely. Roberts ultimately wrote a concurrence doing exactly that, but he stood alone. No other justice joined him.
Kagan's fury, as Biskupic describes it, stemmed from a belief that Sotomayor's combative posture during the justices' private conferences had destroyed any chance of peeling off a conservative vote. The "wall was shaking" detail came from someone near enough to hear the confrontation, though Biskupic did not identify that person by name in the Fox News account.
The behind-the-scenes maneuvering Biskupic describes adds new texture to one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in decades. Kagan, a former Harvard Law School dean and Obama nominee, has long been regarded as the liberal wing's sharpest strategic mind. The book's account suggests she saw a narrow path to preserving at least part of the Roe framework and believed Sotomayor's approach slammed that door shut.
Roberts, for his part, had signaled during oral arguments in December 2021 that he was open to upholding the Mississippi law. His solo concurrence in the final Dobbs opinion, issued June 24, 2022, confirmed he would have stopped short of overruling Roe. But the five-justice majority, led by Alito and joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, went the full distance.
The question of whether any of those five could have been pulled toward a narrower result remains one of the great "what ifs" of modern Supreme Court history. Biskupic's reporting suggests Kagan believed the answer was yes, and that Sotomayor's conduct made it impossible. The revelation speaks to tensions that run deeper than ideology, touching on questions of internal court strategy and institutional discipline that rarely surface publicly.
The Dobbs leak itself remains one of the most extraordinary breaches in Supreme Court history. No draft opinion had ever been leaked to the press before in the modern era. Chief Justice Roberts immediately ordered an investigation, which the Marshal of the Court conducted over several months.
That investigation, completed in January 2023, failed to identify the leaker. The report concluded that investigators could not determine "how or by whom" the draft was provided to Politico. The failure drew sharp criticism from legal commentators across the political spectrum, with some arguing the Court had not pursued the matter aggressively enough.
Biskupic's book reportedly does not identify the leaker or make a definitive claim about who was responsible. But the broader picture she paints, of a Court riven by personal conflict and strategic infighting among the liberal justices themselves, challenges the popular narrative that the leak was simply a last-ditch effort by the left to rally public pressure against the majority.
The episode raised lasting questions about the Court's ability to police its own ranks. Speculation about individual justices' futures has only intensified since then, with every health scare and retirement rumor feeding a broader conversation about the Court's ideological balance.
Sotomayor's joint dissent in Dobbs, co-signed by Kagan and Justice Stephen Breyer, was blistering. The three liberal justices wrote that the majority had "overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them." The dissent accused the majority of placing "in jeopardy other rights, from contraception to same-sex intimacy to same-sex marriage."
That language was among the most pointed in recent Supreme Court history. What Biskupic's account now suggests is that Kagan may have viewed the rhetorical intensity of the liberal bloc's approach as counterproductive, at least in the deliberation stage before the final opinions were issued.
The distinction matters. Kagan's reported anger was not about the dissent's substance after the fact, but about strategic choices made during the months when the outcome might still have been in play. If Biskupic's sourcing holds up, it means the liberal wing was not just outgunned on Dobbs but internally fractured over how to fight.
The Dobbs decision triggered massive political fallout. Protests erupted outside the homes of conservative justices. Congress held hearings. The Department of Homeland Security warned of potential threats against the justices. One man was arrested near Justice Kavanaugh's home and later charged with attempted murder after allegedly traveling there with a gun and other weapons.
Inside the Court, the atmosphere was toxic. Biskupic's book reportedly describes a period in which trust among the justices, already strained, collapsed almost entirely. The leak investigation added to the tension, with clerks and staff subjected to interviews and scrutiny.
The institutional damage extended well beyond the Dobbs case itself. Subsequent terms have seen the justices issue opinions with sharper concurrences and dissents, and public polling on the Court's approval has remained at or near historic lows. The question of whether the Court can function as a deliberative body when its internal proceedings are weaponized is one that continues to shadow the institution.
Biskupic, who has written biographies of Roberts and Sotomayor, has deep sourcing inside the Court. Her previous books have drawn on interviews with justices and their close associates. The new book's claims about the Kagan-Sotomayor confrontation, if accurate, represent one of the most vivid accounts of personal conflict between sitting justices to emerge in years.
The account also raises questions about the liberal wing's capacity to operate as a cohesive bloc going forward. Breyer retired in 2022 and was replaced by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The current liberal minority of three, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, faces a 6-3 conservative majority on most major issues.
If Kagan and Sotomayor remain at odds over strategy, even privately, it could affect their ability to attract crossover votes from Roberts or other conservative justices in close cases. That dynamic matters in a Court where ideological fault lines shape oral arguments and outcomes on the biggest questions of the day.
Neither Kagan nor Sotomayor has publicly commented on Biskupic's account. The Supreme Court's public information office has not issued a statement on the book's claims. That silence is consistent with the Court's longstanding practice of declining to comment on reports about internal deliberations.
Biskupic's book is expected to be released in the coming weeks. Legal observers will be watching closely for additional details about the Dobbs deliberations and other cases from recent terms.
The broader picture, though, is already clear enough. The Court that decided Dobbs was not just divided along the familiar liberal-conservative axis. It was a Court where the liberal justices themselves could not agree on how to lose, and where that disagreement produced a confrontation loud enough to rattle the walls. When ideological blocs fracture from within, the consequences reach far beyond any single opinion.
The walls of the Supreme Court are thick. The fact that this fight was heard through them tells you everything about where the liberal wing stood when it mattered most.
