I love it. Fight it out boys and girl.

One Supreme Court justice says his fellow conservatives are “too dismissive” of government efforts to ensure racial diversity in schools. Another more liberal member says those on the right did “serious violence” to a high school student’s free speech rights.

And one conservative slams another for “faux judicial restraint.”

These were some of the heated written exchanges contained in the final decisions handed down by the high court in the last, frantic days of the term.

With justices rushing to finish business in time for summer recess, the luxury of polite, modest jurisprudence often gives way to bare-knuckle rhetoric, preserving for history the evidence of a divided court.

With the liberal bloc narrowly losing a number of high-profile cases this term — including late-term abortion, campaign finance reform, and public school desegregation — the political and legal stakes produced sharper ideological lines.

Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer all wrote toughly worded dissents, punctuated by reading some of them from the bench. It is a rarely used privilege, reserved for only the biggest, most contentious cases.

“There is very little that dissenters can do. If you don’t have five votes you really don’t have anything,” said Thomas Goldstein, a Washington appellate attorney who has argued many cases before the Supreme Court.

“The one symbolic step that they can take to show they are almost outraged and that they think something terrible has happened is to read these dissents from the bench. And so the fact that the more liberal members of the court have done it is really a sign that they are frustrated.”

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