1962— President Kennedy’s appointment of Arthur Goldberg to replace the retiring Felix Frankfurter creates a clear liberal activist majority on the Supreme Court. As Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel write in Justice Brennan:

Goldberg’s arrival meant that Brennan did not need to accommodate [Byron] White’s concerns [of judicial restraint]: the bloc had its fifth vote without him. After the very first Friday of the term, Brennan came back to his chambers with a look of triumph on his face—a look he would keep all term.

2014—In the course of a long New Republic interview, Justice Ginsburg speaks out against the Texas abortion legislation then under challenge in the Fifth Circuit: “How could you trust legislatures in view of the restrictions states are imposing? Think of the Texas legislation that would put most clinics out of business.”

Despite the fact that this sort of comment by a justice on a specific law is the very stuff of which recusal obligations are made, Ginsburg will go on to take part in, and provide the decisive vote (in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt) overturning, the Fifth Circuit’s decision in favor of the Texas law.