The Gorsuch watch: colloquy interruptus

Source, Adam Liptak: Why Gorsuch May Not Be So Genteel on the Bench – The New York Times

Gorsuch had his first day on the SCOTUS bench and was very active, according to SCOTUS watchers. That is, he asked a lot of questions.

But that’s not the important piece of info. Adam Liptak, the NYT’s SCOTUS reporter, dug up an interesting, if unsurprising, study about…well, read it. This excerpt alone is worth an irritated, knowing chuckle:

Justices interrupt one another all the time, and it may not be easy for the new justice to find his place and to raise his voice this week, when he hears his first arguments.

But a new study suggests that Justice Gorsuch has two things going for him: He is conservative, and he is male.

“Conservatives interrupt liberals at significantly higher rates than liberals interrupt conservatives,” the study, to be published in The Virginia Law Review, found.

And male justices, perhaps not surprisingly, interrupt female justices far more often than the other way around. “Even though female justices speak less often and use fewer words than male justices,” the study found, “they are nonetheless interrupted during oral argument at a significantly higher rate.”

So why did we vote for Hillary? Yeah, well.

And of course that’s my bolding.

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