The Warhol Diaries: Kagan v. Sotomayor

U.S. Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
U.S. Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Photo: Allison Shelley/Getty Images
Eriq Gardner
May 22, 2023

Modern art has always led to arguments over meaning and value—some might even say that’s the point—but who would have guessed that a fight over Andy Warhol would see two of the Supreme Court’s most liberal justices insulting each other in Latin? Alas, that happened last week in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith, when Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan stopped just short of declaring pistols at noon in a case that will influence the next few decades of creative expression in Hollywood and the arts. (Read the whole thing here, including Kagan’s second footnote where she asks the reader to measure Sotomayor’s “ratio of reasoning to ipse dixit,” which is SCOTUS-speak for bullshit.)