"At oral argument, Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court's best questioners, sometimes... just shuts down... Still, her anger is often palpable, the color literally draining from her face. "

"And Justice Stephen Breyer on occasion just holds his head.... There isn't a lot of love lost among the court's six conservatives either.... If you watch carefully, you can see conservative eyes rolling from time to time.... [M]any of the conservatives are vying for the position of intellectual leader of the conservative majority, while the chief justice privately worries about going too far too fast. There are, in addition, some long and perhaps not so buried resentments among the conservatives. Alito on occasion barely conceals his disdain for Roberts.... In recent decades, the court has built its legitimacy on a certain degree of moderation — giving the left some of what it wanted and the right some of what it wanted. The left got gay rights and gay marriage, and some limits on presidential power exercised in the name of national security. And the right got expanded religious liberty and expanded free speech, which brought with it expanded corporate spending in elections.... But... the court's conservatives detest each other in the same way that the justices did in the 1940s. Back then, they couldn't agree on anything because, as [Noah] Feldman notes, 'they hated each other.' and even though they might have been able to to reach a consensus, they didn't 'because the hatred was so deep.' To cite just one example of how bad it was, Justice Felix Frankfurter called Justice William O. Douglas 'one of the completely evil men I have ever met.' And Douglas referred to the Austrian-born Frankfurter, who was Jewish, as 'Der Führer' and that was during World War ll."

Writes Nina Totenberg in "Supreme Court justices aren't 'scorpions,' but not happy campers either" (NPR). 

The "scorpion" quote refers to "9 scorpions in a bottle," a famous phrase that Totenberg doesn't give a source, perhaps because it's so famous, but perhaps because the usual attribution — to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — seems incorrect. Noah Feldman's book "Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices Paperback" begins with the quote "The Supreme Court is nine scorpions in a bottle," attributed to Alexander Bickel, law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1952–53, and drops this footnote:

"Supreme Court unanimously reverses 'Bridgegate' convictions."

Fox News reports:

The court recognized that the lane closures, known commonly as "Bridgegate," were done as political payback against the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J. for not supporting the reelection campaign of then-Governor Chris Christie. The problem, the court pointed out, is that this is not a violation of the statutes under which the defendants were charged.

"The question presented is whether the defendants committed property fraud. The evidence the jury heard no doubt shows wrongdoing—deception, corruption, abuse of power," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the court's unanimous opinion. "But the federal fraud statutes at issue do not criminalize all such conduct."

ADDED: Here's the opinion — Kelly v. United States.

AND: An excerpt from the opinion:

Federal prosecutors may not use property fraud statutes to “set[ ] standards of disclosure and good government for local and state officials.”... Much of governance involves (as it did here) regulatory choice. If U. S. Attorneys could prosecute as property fraud every lie a state or local official tells in making such a decision, the result would be... “a sweeping expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction.”... In effect, the Federal Government could use the criminal law to enforce (its view of ) integrity in broad swaths of state and local policymaking. The property fraud statutes do not countenance that outcome. They do not “proscribe[] schemes to defraud citizens of their intangible rights to honest and impartial government.”... They bar only schemes for obtaining property....

[N]ot every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime. Because the scheme here did not aim to obtain money or property, Baroni and Kelly could not have violated the federal-program fraud or wire fraud laws....

ALSO: Professor Tribe reacts on Twitter: "Congress: let’s amend those statutes!"

That is, he wants the federal prosecutors to be able — in Kagan's words — to "use the criminal law to enforce (its view of ) integrity in broad swaths of state and local policymaking."