Free Republic

Justice Sotomayor also read her dissent from the bench, a move typically reserved to emphasize a justice’s extreme displeasure with a decision.Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court’s three liberals, wrote a scathing dissent criticizing her conservative colleagues’ decision to uphold a state ban on some medical treatments for transgender youths. The justice said that the court had retreated from “meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most,” adding that “the court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims.” Justice Sotomayor also took the rare step of reading her dissent from the bench during the opinion announcement on...

Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis hurried through the medieval monastery that is part of her 500-room palace. It was a chilly autumn night in Bavaria, with rain spitting outside, as she arrived at the chapel to pray. The room glowed red, lit from a crypt below where her husband and other family members lay in their coffins. The princess knelt and soft bells sounded. Her dinner guests, a British baroness and her husband, slipped in to join her as a priest led prayers. Princess Gloria, 64, who burst onto the international scene in the 1980s..as since evolved into a...

In late August, amid a rising outcry over revelations that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had received decades of undisclosed gifts and free luxury travel, a lawyer in Chicago fired off an email to her fellow former Thomas clerks. “Many of us have been asked recently about the justice,” wrote the lawyer, Taylor Meehan. “In response, there’s not always the opportunity to tell his story and share what it was like to work for him. And there’s rarely the opportunity for us to do so all together.” Meehan attached a letter in support of Thomas. Minutes later came a reply....