During last week’s oral arguments over the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for private companies, Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed that over 100,000 children are in “serious condition” with covid-19. Many, including The Post’s Glenn Kessler, pointed out that while omicron does seem to affect children more than other variants of the coronavirus, Sotomayor’s figure was wrong by a factor of about 20.
It is, of course, a big deal for a justice to make such an inaccurate claim during oral arguments (though some critics have shamefully revived bigoted nonsense from when she was nominated — that she’s dumb or was an “affirmative action pick”). I won’t pretend to know why Sotomayor made the claim. Perhaps she misspoke or misread some data. Or perhaps, as more partisan critics seem to think, she deliberately cited a fake statistic to defend the Biden administration’s vaccination policy.
But for all the furor over Sotomayor, her mistake came during oral arguments, not a written opinion. And that brings us to a bigger problem far more consequential but much less discussed: Supreme Court justices have a history of making factual errors in written opinions for which they have ample time to research and fact-check. Some of these errors have had sweeping consequences for constitutional rights. And the court has never bothered to correct them.
The court has repeatedly held, for example, that an alert from a drug-sniffing dog constitutes probable cause for a more extensive search....
By JAMELLE BOUIE Donald Trump knew as well as anyone that he had lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square. He knew there was no conspiracy to commit voter fraud — no mysterious mail bal...