“I would hope,” she said, “that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” At her 2009 confirmation hearings, Justice Sotomayor disavowed the remark, saying it was a “rhetorical flourish that fell flat.”

Last month’s dissent, in Schuette v. BAMN, was a mix of legal analysis, historical overview and policy arguments. It looked closely at the governing precedents, reminded readers of the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, decried recent “discriminatory changes to voting procedures” and reproduced graphs on declining enrollment rates for black and Hispanic students at public universities in states that have banned race-conscious admissions. But what stood out was a fairly brief reflection about what it was like to grow up Puerto Rican in New York City.

“Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, ‘No, where are you really from?’ regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country,” she wrote. “Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home.”

Justice Sotomayor seemed eager to tangle with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who was raised in middle-class comfort in Indiana. She called his views on race “out of touch with reality.”

He responded with a tart concurrence. “It is not ‘out of touch with reality,’ ” he wrote, “to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect of reinforcing precisely that doubt, and — if so — that the preferences do more harm than good.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, the other beneficiary of affirmative action on the court, did not write separately in last month’s decision. But he has made plain, in a memoir and in earlier opinions, that he views racial preferences as toxic.