Sonia Sotomayor And Elena Kagan Vote The Same All The Time

I get the fact that the Anthony Weiner stuff is dominating current landscape, but the fact that Sotomayor and Kagan vote more alike than Scalia and Thomas (two justices liberals have told us for years are one and the same) do is something the conservative media needs to be concerned about:

They're in a New York state of mind.


The newest members of the nation's highest court -- local Obama appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan -- have agreed with each other in all 23 cases they've voted on, which is a supreme rarity, observers said.


Liberal critics who deride the Supreme Court's rightward shift over the past 10 years have cited conservative alliances like "Scalito," Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito.


But Scalia and Alito have agreed with each other in only 84 percent of cases in the current term, which winds up this month.


egal scholars find the Sotomayor-Kagan mind meld a bit unusual but hardly shocking.


"The pattern of agreement is typically based on ideology or a view of the law," said professor Barry Friedman of NYU Law School. "It's not that surprising that Barack Obama's two appointees showed agreement."


But the New York twins don't just agree in general terms. Justices can agree fully or partially in a case, depending on whether they write a separate concurring or dissenting opinion. Often two justices will come to the same general conclusion for very different reasons.


Sotomayor, who joined the court two years ago, and Kagan, who began serving last October, agreed fully 91 percent of the time.


Scalia and Alito were in full agreement only 59 percent of the time, according to statistics compiled by the Web site SCOTUSblog.


Only three other pairs of justices fully agreed more than 79 percent of the time.