In short
Supreme Court justices’ media appearances via book tours (“Justices on Parade”), plus big-law partnership structure and a quirky civil procedure story about service of process.
Guests
Joe Patrice (host; Above the Law), Catherine Rubino (Above the Law), Chris Williams (Above the Law). They discuss legal news and industry culture.
Key claims
Amy Coney Barrett’s Fox News book-tour interview about the 22nd Amendment allegedly showed equivocation—“true” followed by ambiguity—rather than a straightforward constitutional answer, raising concerns about rule-of-law clarity and recusal. Justice Sotomayor’s Stephen Colbert appearance is criticized for undermining the seriousness of her dissents by emphasizing collegiality and treating them like “play acting.”
Notable examples
Barrett/22nd Amendment third-term question; Sotomayor reading/defending dissents on Colbert; Ropes & Gray keeping a single-tier partnership; Tory Lanez/Megan Thee Stallion defamation case where a process server used a mariachi band to get Aiden Ross to leave his house for deposition service.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOSmall Talk and Reflections
0:45 to 5:30
Casual conversation among hosts touching on seasons and personal anecdotes.
“It's the beginning of that season, so we just did a tournament of that, talking about labor, organized labor, which is an exciting topic.”
Justices on Parade: Supreme Court Media Interactions
5:30 to 10:50
Discussion on how Supreme Court justices engage with the media and public.
“We have a couple stories from this week.”
Justice Barrett and the 22nd Amendment
10:50 to 14:01
Analysis of Justice Barrett's comments on the 22nd Amendment during an interview.
“This is not a text that you really have to parse through to understand.”
Supreme Court Dynamics and Public Perception
14:01 to 19:06
Explore how Supreme Court justices' public appearances affect public understanding of the court's serious decisions.
“And one that was also a little disturbing to me.”
The Future of Single Tier Partnerships in Law
19:11 to 21:18
Examine the implications of Ropes and Gray maintaining a single tier partnership model in a changing legal landscape.
“Well, this one is coming to us about big law real quick.”
Challenges of Non-Equity Partnerships
21:18 to 22:30
Discuss the impact of non-equity partnerships on law firms and diversity practices.
“I think that it certainly has increased the number of people who have that title.”
Creative Service of Process: A Unique Case Study
22:30 to 25:52
Learn about an unusual method used in a high-profile legal case involving a rapper and a mariachi band.
“All right, so let's move on, take a break, and hit our last topic.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:11Sonia Sotomayor:Welcome again to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I'm Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I'm joined by some Above the Law colleagues, Catherine Rubino and Chris Williams. Hello. And, you know, this is the show we do recapping some of the big stories from the week that was in legal over here at Above the Law. But we begin with a little bit of small talk time. Yeah. So, yeah, it's definitely cooled off here.
0:36Amy Coney Barrett:Yeah. Fall is official and it's not August, so I'm not going to be pissy about it. Good news. Good news.
0:43Sonia Sotomayor:Yeah. I mean, it's the beginning from those of us who work with the college debate scene. It's the beginning of that season, so we just did a tournament of that, talking about labor, organized labor, which is an exciting topic. What else is going on? Just getting ready for the closing up shop, doing that mow where you think, is this maybe the last one I have to do, that kind of thing.
1:10Amy Coney Barrett:Oh, for the lawn? Is that what you're talking about? Does lawn stop growing in the winter?
1:17Sonia Sotomayor:You don't see a lot of people mowing their lawn in December, do you?
1:20Amy Coney Barrett:I guess I don't, but I never really thought about it because it doesn't really die.
1:25Sonia Sotomayor:Makes sense. You're an adult woman. Why would you have ever had an interaction where this happened? I don't mean that in a sexist way. I mean that as in you're like an adult. How is it you've not seen this? That may still be a sexist, Joe. Fair enough. What?
1:39Amy Coney Barrett:I spent the overwhelming majority of my life in New York City. That's true. Lawns were barely a thing.
1:44Sonia Sotomayor:I guess. Well, they're parks though, right? But you're in Staten Island.
1:51Amy Coney Barrett:First of all, that was not the majority of where I've lived. I guess that's fair. First of all, but also we didn't have a lawn growing up. We had cement. You'd cement with like a little like decorative rock thrown in. Fair enough, fair enough. But I mean, but grass doesn't die in the winter, right? It still stays green.
2:10Sonia Sotomayor:Ish, yeah.
2:11Amy Coney Barrett:I mean, yeah, for sure ish, but it doesn't grow. I think the word is dormant. Interesting. Well, I will say this. I don't mean this to take away from this horrible grass knowledge that Catherine has displayed, but a story that came from law school that I thought was funny. To Joe's point, and this one isn't sexist because this was a grown ass man, one of my best friends in law school. He grew up in California. And so then we came home. We came to, you know, learn about the law and the hellhole that is Missouri. it sounds like misery for a reason and it's about the snow and i'm like yo you grew up in california you might not have seen snow do you want to see the snow and he's like oh i don't believe in snow i'm like what he's like yeah it's not real it's just uh it's propaganda so i take him outside we see the snow falling he's like no no it's fake like as if god had a bad case of hair of uh danger for something.
3:06Amy Coney Barrett:But yeah, it is funny how where people grew up changes the basic things that they should know. But for the fact of being in a concrete jungle, you don't see much actual grass.
3:19Sonia Sotomayor:Yeah, snow is very real. It's not like birds, which aren't.
3:23Amy Coney Barrett:Okay, we have now, we have taken a sharp left turn into conspiracy theories, and maybe we shouldn't. No, no, that one is true. The pigeons recharge them on telephone wires, but... Yeah, I mean, haven't you scene. But my weekend was good. I rode my bike. And the thing is, riding a bike is like riding a bike. You don't forget it. But you do forget what, but you can't forget what riding a bike feels like. So my tires were low. I aired my tires up and I was going. I was going. I was like, hit like maybe like 18 miles, which is slow compared to the like the 30 or so I used to be able to do depending on the amount of incline.
4:03Amy Coney Barrett:And I was riding with my friend who was also philosophy nerd and i was just like what i said was man i used to ride bikes it's like this moment of like reflection and acknowledgement and there was a little bit of sadness in there and he made it worse he was like there's this moment where um nietzsche was being taken care of by his uh sister which is one of the reasons why we remember him as being a nazi today although he didn't really like nazis at all um and he and she would show him off at parties to be like hey this is the guy who was popular and wrote books and he was mad uh he he was mad not not angry but like the syphilis ran through his mind but he had this one rare moment of lucidity where he's at a party and he just says i used to write books and then he goes back to not being lucid anymore and that's what riding my bike felt like so i really want to get back into riding my bike so it's not as sad But yeah, I used to ride bikes, and I remembered that this weekend.
5:01Sonia Sotomayor:Chris with a story that's human, all too human.
5:04Amy Coney Barrett:Oh, that was good. For those who aren't aware, that is a title of Anisha book, which you probably encounter through debate, so there's that. Full circle. I'm a professional.
5:19Sonia Sotomayor:All right, with that said, let's close out our small talk and move on to a conversation that is also about talking and talk shows and the Justices on Parade. We have a couple stories from this week.
5:35Amy Coney Barrett:That is actually a great little mini title for this segment.
5:39Sonia Sotomayor:Might be the title of this episode even. Yeah. Justices on Parade. So we had two instances where we have Supreme Court justices speaking to the media. This is not something that they do as a matter of course. They try to keep themselves cloistered and write their opinions, but occasionally they have books and such. And they go and talk to normal people or as normal as the media is. And I just thought it was an interesting, you know, to be a little philosophical about it, to think about how these justices interact with a world when they've built such a wall around themselves. And I thought it was really interesting as a psychological experiment, kind of how they interact with media.
6:25Amy Coney Barrett:I think it's interesting as well, because there's certainly political figures, right? You know, nine of the most important individuals in the way our government works. But unlike other politicians, their personalities are not necessarily suited for the sort of the outward facing elements of the job because they don't have to be elected. They're never elected. You know, the things that make them really good at what they do are, you know, the lawyering, the judging, the sort of legal academia are not necessarily those public facing media savvy kinds of jobs. unlike politics, you know, proper, having to be elected and that kind of stuff.
7:06Amy Coney Barrett:So I think it is really fascinating to see how people who may not have gravitated towards the limelight have dealt with an intense limelight.
7:15Sonia Sotomayor:Like Justice O 'Connor is the last one that we had who had like actual political experience. But I mean, it used to not be uncommon. I mean, Earl Warren ran for vice president before he became the chief justice.
7:27Amy Coney Barrett:I guess I was more specifically talking about modern because I do think modern media is also a different entity.
7:33Sonia Sotomayor:Oh, I guess that's fair too. Modern media is a little different. Well, so let's move a little forward here to talk about a couple of these examples. Yeah. So Amy Coney Barrett continuing her I'm going to make Joe the Joker tour as we discussed from the last episode. She appeared on Fox News to talk about her book and she found herself, there's an element to which I think that she deep down has kind of a sense of where reality is and then occasionally remembers that her job is focused on denying that a lot of the time. So she was asked by Fox News about the 22nd Amendment and just said, hey, can Trump serve a third term?
8:12Sonia Sotomayor:The 22nd Amendment says they're limited at two terms, and she goes, true.
8:18Amy Coney Barrett:You're not wrong, but I think there's a different way to tell that story that is more accurate. it so there's the guy who works with fox he's like so the 22nd amendment says there can only be two terms right wink wink that's the big part of it like it seems like it was a setup for there
8:34Sonia Sotomayor:to for her to create ambiguity well so well so that's the thing the and and i'm gonna pull back and kind of clarify that like that's the issue i don't think the first question was the first question was like so it says that she's like true and she's like woo aced that one and then he goes And then he says, like, then after she says true, he gets a little off kiltered. It's just like, well, I mean, do you think that's really cut and dried? And she's like, oh, well. That's the ambiguity setting up.
9:03Amy Coney Barrett:Like, if you say we should not commit crimes and then you follow it up with, is that really that clear cut? You're suggesting committing crimes.
9:12Sonia Sotomayor:Exactly. Exactly. But the timeline, I think, is important because the first question, which was fairly straightforward, she gave what would be an accurate response, not quite knowing the game she was playing.
9:25Amy Coney Barrett:And then goes back to the lack of media savvy that she has.
9:29Sonia Sotomayor:And then came the wink, wink question where she was like, oh, whoa. All right.
9:33Amy Coney Barrett:Forgot.
9:35Sonia Sotomayor:I have forgotten myself. And her response to that was, well, that's what the amendment, the text of the amendment seems to say, blah, blah, blah. So the correct answer to borrow from the immortal Winston Zedmore from Ghostbusters, when someone asks you if you are a god, you say yes. If somebody asks you if the 22nd Amendment bars a third term, the correct answer is just yes. That's all she needed to say. The fact that she went down the road of trying to have any kind of other response when she was pushed, she should have just doubled down on the true and said, no, yeah, no, it does say that. But rather than do that, she started her equivocation, which is disturbing.
10:17Sonia Sotomayor:It is kind of a sign of where the, you know, starting to workshop that president for life opinion that is inevitably coming.
10:25Amy Coney Barrett:Well, I mean, it's still three years in the future and a lot of things can happen then. Maybe it won't, but it is.
10:33Sonia Sotomayor:Some alt causes, yeah.
10:35Amy Coney Barrett:Yeah, but I do think you're right that this should not be a controversial question. This is a really easy question. This is also not the first judicial figure that has not given the incredibly obvious answer to similar questions. And it is worrying. This is not a text that you really have to parse through to understand. This is pretty straightforward, and I don't – it's deeply worrying.
11:07Sonia Sotomayor:So to give a defense of her, to give her a bit of a defense and then explain why that makes no sense, there is an argument to be had that she might feel that if she's too forceful in her response about what the literal Constitution says, says, then it would be grounds for her to be recused in any eventual case because she's made a public comment that makes it clear her feelings that she's prejudged this issue. That is ridiculous on a lot of levels, not the least of which there's no rules for the Supreme Court. So why would she feel like she has to recuse herself over anything? And also being able to say what black letter law is, is still you should still be able to say that.
Read the full transcript
11:54Sonia Sotomayor:And I think it's actually kind of damaging to the concept of the rule of law to have judges who are unwilling to state clearly and publicly what black letter law says.
12:05Amy Coney Barrett:That said, I would not be surprised if there was a case or if there was a free speech case of somebody who was like, Contagy has to recuse because she said the First Amendment protects speech. Right.
12:16Sonia Sotomayor:Sure. People are going to say that sort of thing. Yeah, absolutely. And it's it's been used by both sides as a sword. and shield in nomination proceedings whenever they're asked questions they go oh well i can't answer that obvious question because otherwise i might have to hear a case about it uh as a way of hiding their or trying to play down their actual beliefs but you know once you're on the court you
12:39Amy Coney Barrett:you really have we have no actual recusal system right like you just go ahead clarence thomas has heard cases that are directly related to work that his wife has done and did not feel the need to recuse himself with zero consequences.
12:53Sonia Sotomayor:Scalia went hunting with people who were like had business before the court. Right. Yeah.
12:58Amy Coney Barrett:The Supreme Court members look at recusal like we look at sick days. Yeah. It's like, I don't feel like going in today. Fuck it. Y 'all can have the Exxon matter. Like it's, you know.
13:07Sonia Sotomayor:Yeah. It's not great. So that's why I don't really buy that excuse. It is worrying to have justices who aren't willing to kind of say what the law is on that front. But also, so getting back to the theme of this conversation, it is an instance of a justice who doesn't seem to quite get the importance of the media and the role that her saying something like that has. Now, she kind of lucked out. Several media outlets are treating it as she seemed skeptical, which, I mean, good. But I'm glad that they're getting that out of that. I very much saw her say no, and then when pressed go, maybe, which seems a lot worse.
13:50Sonia Sotomayor:The flip side of this also, the flip side is Justice Sotomayor was on Stephen Colbert, a different media instance. And one that was also a little disturbing to me. I mean, I understand her position, but I think it's hard for the public to understand what's going on at the court when you see these snippets of these dissents that are wildly powerful. This is an abuse of the system, saying things about this is, you know, like a grossly, grossly abusive or an overreach and so on. All of that sort of language comes across in these dissents. And then when they show up on TV and are asked about it, it's nothing but, well, I mean, I disagreed with them, but in fairness to my colleagues, like that's just the way in which their kind of justices just feel like they have to talk in public after they've just written a brutal takedown and submitted it to the printer.
14:55Sonia Sotomayor:on TV they just don't follow through and I think that leads to a sense of I felt it kind of undermined the seriousness of the issue it led to an idea that uh it gives the public the impression that this is you know they're all friends and they get a lot and you know this is just kind of all semantics it's not really all that serious they're just play acting almost uh which I thought Colbert who is one of the more savvy media people around I thought he did a very good job by actively pushing back on a Supreme Court justice about what the law was, because he pushed back very directly. He's like, yeah, but doesn't this justify these things?
15:33Amy Coney Barrett:I mean, for a really long time, the Supreme Court has had this sort of veneer of collegiality that they work really hard to promote. You know, whether it was the stories placed in the media that of Ginsburg and Scalia going to the opera together or, you know, talks about how they all eat lunch together and refuse to talk about politics or something like that. I think that there's, for some reason, that's really important to the people on the court to pretend like we had fight in our dissents but still have lunch together and toast one another. And I don't get it, but that appears for a long time to be how they do business.
16:16Amy Coney Barrett:A thing that I think undermines the issue is that she went to a comedy show to talk about the importance of her dissent. For example, the group of federal judges that anonymously went to an actual news source. Why couldn't she have had an actual interview with an actual news reporter to help draw attention to the seriousness of this? I get that Coburn has a big audience. And it is funny the way that he read the dissent. But there's a thing about comedians trying to play serious. It's just like it's just a jokester in a suit. I mean, I think there was one time where Colbert was like presenting to Congress and it was like, why is he here?
16:52Amy Coney Barrett:Why is he the one doing this? Like nobody cares about what Ja Rule thinks.
16:56Sonia Sotomayor:Yeah, I think Jon Stewart has testified before Congress several times. I think Jon Stewart, I think, is a different case.
17:03Amy Coney Barrett:I think people actually see him as being serious.
17:06Sonia Sotomayor:Oh, I think Colbert is very much it. I mean, they started up together in this space. I think they're the same deal.
17:12Amy Coney Barrett:But I think that like Colbert plays the I'm joking harder. Like, for example, I'm looking at a copy of a book by him from years ago. I'm America and so can you. So it's like serious face, eyebrows up. It's like there's a there's a jokiness to him that I think that is not the same as Jon Stewart. I think Jon Stewart, like I think of him, I think about his work with like firefighters after 9-11. He's spoken more openly about serious things, like even his need to return. He was like, I need to do this the right way. I think they have different comedic tones on these things.
17:41Sonia Sotomayor:Yeah, no, I don't have a problem with the comedy issue. I just think that when I don't I think it goes to a failure to understand the importance of their position in media. And when you understand why she does it for this collegiality issue. But when you go on TV and make it seem like these important issues are, you know, we we we fight hard and play hard, sort of like, you know, we we argue about them in these dissents. But deep down, we're all friends. It signals to the public that none of this matters. And in an era where faith in institutions is tanking, I think there's a mistake going on where people think that faith in institutions will be restored if folks believe the people in the institutions all feel, you know, all really get together at the end of the day and want to cooperate.
18:36Sonia Sotomayor:whereas I think the opposite is true. I think there's a – I mean it can be true in certain conditions, but under where we are now, I think the people will have more faith in institutions if they believe that those institutions are not just cosplaying at democracy and that people really do believe there are stakes and fights and they are willing to say and call out the seriousness of the stakes.
19:03Amy Coney Barrett:We agree there.
19:04Sonia Sotomayor:Anyway, so let's take a break there and move on to our other topics. All right. Well, this one is coming to us about big law real quick. Ropes and Gray decided to stay with a single tier partnership. It's one of a dying breed these days of single tiers.
19:22Amy Coney Barrett:Yeah, I think it's very much bucking a bit of a trend that's going on. We wrote a series of stories over the last three or four years of firms that were very We famously had a single tier of partnership deciding to do away with that and create a non-equity tier of partnership in order to create flexibility at the firms there. We've talked a lot about the big paydays for laterals. And if you have a single tier of partnership, it's a lot harder to throw$20 million at a potential rainmaker to get them to join your firm. So I think that's part of it.
19:57Sonia Sotomayor:Yeah. The death of the single tier has been somewhat sad, I think. Because I do think that having worked in a firm that operated that way, I feel like maintaining that at the top trickles down. And the culture kind of respects, it kind of speaks to a culture of we're all in this together that the eat what you kill model doesn't quite do.
20:20Amy Coney Barrett:I think that it's part of the overall change in the legal industry from a real partnership model to a corporate model. Yeah. And I think that despite whether it's still an LLP or whatever, I think adding the additional tier partnership makes it more corporate and less partner.
20:40Sonia Sotomayor:Now, I will say as somebody who does some consulting with a legal placement firm, I will say getting rid of the single tier partnership is great on that front. It is very lucrative to find people and direct them to their best use case, the way market economy is supposed to operate. I do, however, hold as a legal analyst some pangs for the loss of what once was kind of an academic and collegial big law culture. And it's good that Roats and Grey is sticking with this for now, but who knows?
21:17Amy Coney Barrett:Do you think that creating the non-equity tier of partnership makes firms a little bit looser with their decision to make people partners? I think that it certainly has increased the number of people who have that title.
21:30Sonia Sotomayor:Yeah, I think it does. I think that – I've written about how the non-equity tier has serious problems. problems. I think it is used as a way in which they can fulfill in a disingenuous way their diversity obligations, which I guess right now, that's the least of our worries. They're all firing all their HR people and deleting all the diversity stuff they do. So this one's the least of our problems right now, but on that front. But yeah, no, I think the non-equity thing, it's like the memes that you keep seeing about the boomers who all bought their house for $10 ,000 and are sitting on it still and nobody else can get housing.
22:10Sonia Sotomayor:It's a lot like that. I think there's a lot of older partners who used to be forced to make a up and out decision about somebody eight years into their career who now just go, eh, I think I'll keep all this money for myself and we'll shunt them off into this non-equity tier. All right, so let's move on, take a break, and hit our last topic. All right, cue the mariachi music. What is going on with service of process out there?
22:43Amy Coney Barrett:You're being deposed. No, so this is one of those things. It's like trying to explain what a gripper is to a normie. All right, so there was this rapper. His name is Tory Lanez. There was this other musician who's also a rapper sometimes, Megan Thee Stallion. uh tory lane was accused of shooting megan lee stoward in the foot among other things he was he was locked up sent to jail for a couple years but during this trial there are these people called streamers well you get what i'm saying so streamers um main ones being aiden ross dj academics kassin not might have touched on it but basically a lot of streamers were giving their thoughts on the case saying like oh he didn't shoot her um she's making things up what have you blah, blah, blah.
23:25Amy Coney Barrett:She's suing them for defamation. Her and her lawyers, some maybe lawyers from Roc Nation, wanted to sue this, wanted to depose this particular guy. His name was Aiden Ross, who spoke a lot on the issue because, hey, it's free content. Thing is, he was holed up in his house. So in order to get him involved in lawsuit, they had to serve him. He wouldn't come out. So what they did was they got a mariachi band to play out front of his house until he left. And then as As soon as he set out the door, they served him the notice that he was going to be deposed. So that was an interesting story in Civ Pro.
23:58Amy Coney Barrett:You know, you can't just like, you can't just email a guy, hey, we're suing your ass.
24:02Sonia Sotomayor:You know, process servers face a lot of challenges. I think that is, that's a new angle for them to potentially get the job done that I hadn't thought of before.
24:13Amy Coney Barrett:Geneva Convention be damned. so if you know somebody wants to sue you and you hear la cucaracha out of nowhere you should be suspicious yeah i i'm not sure that that is the music that would most is most likely to force me
24:29Sonia Sotomayor:from my house but you know okay i mean if if for no other reason than to make it stop i think yeah
24:38Amy Coney Barrett:so it would work on joe uh for catherine it would be like some unreleased taylor swift song about how much she loves her husband to be.
24:46Sonia Sotomayor:I actually kind of like, I enjoy mariachi music in its setting. I think, you know, I don't get upset. Well, that would be a little bit different.
24:58Amy Coney Barrett:But doesn't that, at 2 a.m. probably runs afoul of noise ordinances, though, right? Sure. Like, so you could call the authorities and be like, hey, there's someone outside making noise. I mean, if you want to be a snitch, yeah. Okay, that's fair. What do you call it? ice? They're mariachi-ing menacingly. No, you're not allowed to be too loud at 2am. That is actually the rules.
25:23Sonia Sotomayor:Well, now Catherine's been cancelled. Who's from New York now? The city that never sleeps? Come on. There was the Staten Island. Yeah. No, interesting story and very creative use of the process server role. So, If you're out there, if you have a mariachi band, like one of the ones that I see at the subway occasionally, you could get a second potentially more lucrative gig serving processed people.
25:50Amy Coney Barrett:As a processed server. Oh, please. If you have a small to mid-sized practice and you are using mariachis to do your marketing to help recruit clients, let us know. Yeah. We respect that.
26:03Sonia Sotomayor:All right. Well, are we done? I think so. Thanks, everybody, for listening. You should be subscribed to the show so you get new episodes when they come out. You should be leaving reviews, stars, all that sort of stuff. You should be listening to the Jabot, Catherine's other podcast. I'm also a guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. You should be listening to the other shows on the Legal Talk Network. We read above the law. That way you read these and other stories before they come out. You can follow on social media at abovelaw.com, at JoePatrice, at Catherine1, the numeral one, and at Rights4Rent.
26:37Sonia Sotomayor:That's all blue sky. I still have a limited Twitter presence too, but, you know, mostly over there. And with that, I think we're done. Peace. Bye.
From the publisher
Compare and contrast as ACB and Sotomayor ride (media) circuit.
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Amy Coney Barrett and Sonia Sotomayor are both hitting the talk shows and it's highlighting how awkward the nation's relationship with the Supreme Court really is. Barrett went on Fox and accurately stated that the Constitution prohibits Trump running for a third term. Then the host offered a "wink wink" prompt and she started backpedaling. Meanwhile, Sotomayor went on Colbert and bent over backward to give her conservative colleagues the benefit of the doubt, requiring Colbert to step in and remind us of the fire in Sotomayor's dissent. Two very different media hits, but a consistent reminder that the justices just aren't willing to forge a genuine connection with the public over media. Also, Ropes & Gray maintains a single-tier partnership (for now) and Megan Thee Stallion case introduces the world to process servers taking things up a notch.