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They’re in a New York state of mind.
The newest members of the nation’s highest court — local Obama appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — have agreed with each other in all 23 cases they’ve voted on, which is a supreme rarity, observers said.
Liberal critics who deride the Supreme Court’s rightward shift over the past 10 years have cited conservative alliances like “Scalito,” Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito.
But Scalia and Alito have agreed with each other in only 84 percent of cases in the current term, which winds up this month.
Legal scholars find the Sotomayor-Kagan mind meld a bit unusual but hardly shocking.
“The pattern of agreement is typically based on ideology or a view of the law,” said professor Barry Friedman of NYU Law School. “It’s not that surprising that Barack Obama’s two appointees showed agreement.”
But the New York twins don’t just agree in general terms. Justices can agree fully or partially in a case, depending on whether they write a separate concurring or dissenting opinion. Often two justices will come to the same general conclusion for very different reasons.
Sotomayor, who joined the court two years ago, and Kagan, who began serving last October, agreed fully 91 percent of the time.
Scalia and Alito were in full agreement only 59 percent of the time, according to statistics compiled by the Web site SCOTUSblog.
Only three other pairs of justices fully agreed more than 79 percent of the time.
Friedman, author of “The Will of the People,” said one possible reason why Kagan, a former Upper West Sider, and Sotomayor, a Bronx native, think alike on so many judicial issues could be their shared experiences of growing up in New York in the 1960s and ’70s
But he’s skeptical.
“There’s nothing inexorable about being a New Yorker,” he said, pointing out that the conservative Scalia grew up in Elmhurst, Queens.
Court observers question whether the New York twins will remain allied.
In the early 1970s, “when Richard Nixon appointed [St. Paul-born] Warren Burger and [St.-Paul-raised] Harry Blackmun, they agreed all the time and they were called the ‘Minnesota Twins,’ ” Friedman said.
“By the end” — in the mid-1990s — “they disagreed all the time.”
With four weeks left in the court’s term, there are still 31 opinions due, and traditionally the court leaves the most contentious cases for last.
But so far, the nine justices have been in remarkable harmony. More than half of the cases decided have been unanimous. Only four (8 percent) have been 5-4 rulings.
The court hasn’t finished a term in five years with more than half of the cases unanimous. The incidence of 5-4 decisions was 29 percent two years ago.