Last month, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dropped an inflammatory allegation on most of her colleagues.

On August 21, the Supreme Court handed down a baffling order that required researchers, who claim that the Trump administration illegally cut off their federal grants, to navigate a convoluted procedural maze in two different courts. Jackson labeled this decision “Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist.” Calvinball, an ever-changing game featured in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, “has only one rule: There are no fixed rules.”

In this Court, Jackson continued, there are two: The rules always change, and “this Administration always wins.”

Under the Versailles-like norms that constrain lawyers and judges, this kind of allegation is simply verboten. While Jackson’s Democratic colleagues often criticize the Court’s decisions, they frequently go out of their way to say that all of the justices “are operating in good faith.” Law students are trained to never suggest that a judge acted for partisan reasons, largely because judges take great umbrage at this allegation. And there is real danger in Jackson’s decision to speak of her Republican colleagues as if they are Republicans.

Last year, after five of the Court’s Republicans voted to neutralize a constitutional provision barring insurrectionists from seeking public office during the 2024 election, the Court’s Democrats signed a brief opinion accusing them of going “beyond the necessities of this case to limit how [the Constitution] can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President.”