There’s been so much coverage of Judge Sotomayor in the NY Times (and of course elsewhere), it is hard to keep track of it. But I was struck in reading this Times piece Saturday about the controversial Ricci case, involving the New Haven firefighters exam. Rather than write its own opinion, the three judge Second Circuit panel, including Judge Sotomayor, affirmed for the reasons given by the district court in a short order.
At the very end of Adam Liptak’s excellent article on the case comes this revelation:

In the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor was the junior judge on the panel, which also included Judge Rosemary S. Pooler, who was the presiding judge at the argument, and Judge Robert D. Sack, who did not attend due to illness.
In the end, according to court personnel familiar with some of the internal discussions of the case, the three judges had difficulty finding consensus, with Judge Sack the most reluctant to join a decision affirming the district court. Judge Pooler, as the presiding judge, took the leading role in fashioning the compromise. The use of a summary order, which ordinarily cannot be cited as precedent, was part of that compromise.

This is exactly what I would have expected as the reason for the use of the brief, per curiam order. But the fact that this information was leaked about the judges’ deliberations is pretty extraordinary. Sometimes such information leaks out years later. (At the Supreme Court level, the information comes out when a late Justice’s papers are made public.) I cannot recall another instance in which such information came out about a pending case that could well go back to the same court on remand.