Justice Sonia Sotomayor has suddenly changed her tune. The outspoken jurist had remarkably warm words for a fellow justice, Clarence Thomas, who is an ideological opposite.

Speaking at a gathering of the American Constitution Society, Justice Sotomayor praised the court’s senior justice as “a man who cares deeply about the court as an institution” and waxed that “we share a common understanding about people and kindness towards them.”

This outburst of collegiality reminds of the famed friendship between Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. After The Great Scalia passed away, Justice Ginsburg recalled “from our years together at the D.C. Circuit, we were best buddies.” Their bond even spawned its own opera, “Ginsburg/Scalia.”   

Justice Sotomayor has not always felt so warmly toward her colleagues on the bench. In December, referring to the possibility that Roe v. Wade would be overturned, she asked, “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible.”

It appears that the stench has now been deodorized. It’s a surprising development, given that the possible repudiation of Roe now appears probable after the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion, which read in part, “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”

With a ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health expected imminently, it is difficult not to speculate as to whether Justice Sotomayor’s constitutional cooing signals an attempt to conciliate the court’s conservative stalwart or is animated by another possibility — that Justice Thomas, the senior justice, has brokered an abortion compromise. 

In the oral arguments for Dobbs, Chief Justice Roberts floated a middle way that would have upheld the Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 week while also preserving Roe. It is not clear whether there is sufficient support among the Nine for such a splitting of constitutional — forgive me — heirs.     

Justice Thomas has been unsparing in his expressions of disapproval of the leak in the wake of Politico publishing the manuscript. He called that act “a kind of infidelity” and “tremendously bad” and wondered “how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them.” 

If the current state of the court leaves much to be desired for Justice Thomas, he publicly pines for the halcyon days when “we actually trusted each other. We may have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family, and we loved it.”

Justice Sotomayor has had another occasion to assert collegial relations with her colleagues. In January, journalist Nina Totenberg reported that tensions over mask wearing had surged among the Nine, suggesting that Chief Justice Roberts had been forced into a mediating role between Justices Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch. 

The two associate justices then issued an unusual statement. “Reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask surprised us,” their statement said. “It is false. While we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends.”

Eyebrows were raised about the extent of that collegiality when, in an otherwise concise grant of an application for a stay,  Justice Brett Kavanaugh took particularly personal aim at Justice Elena Kagan, writing that “the principal dissent’s catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket’ is similarly off target.”

There is, in any event, precedent for a justice teasing the public about a pending decision. In 2012, on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Obamacare case, Justice Ginsburg told the ACS that “those who know don’t talk. And those who talk don’t know.” She seemed in a surprisingly upbeat mood.

One could see why that might have been. For at the 11th hour, Chief Justice Roberts switched his vote in a way that preserved the Obamacare legislative leviathan by ruling that the individual mandate was an exercise of Congress’s taxing power.

As then, we don’t know which way the court will go. All we know is that Justice Sotomayor is kvelling about what a wonderful colleague Justice Thomas is. It makes one want to stop — and speculate.