Washington CNN  — 

A brief burst of humor broke the starchy formality of the Supreme Court on Monday as Justice Antonin Scalia mangled the name of his friend and colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Scalia called Ginsburg “Goldberg” while announcing from the bench that she was dissenting from a court ruling on immigration, sparking a ripple of laughter from lawyers and members of the public in the courtroom.

“What did I say?” Scalia asked, after one of his colleagues informed him that he had misspoken. He then sheepishly apologized, saying “sorry about that, Ruth.”

Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on April 17, 2014.

Perhaps Scalia was thinking of former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who resigned from the court in 1965 to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

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Goldberg, who died in 1990 at age 81, later said he regretted the decision to quit the court, which he took under pressure from President Lyndon Johnson.

It’s unlikely that Ginsburg, a liberal justice appointed by President Bill Clinton, will take umbrage at the slip by Scalia, a conservative elevated to the court by President Ronald Reagan.

The two, despite their opposing political outlooks, are close friends away from the bench.

And soon it will be even less likely that people get Ginsburg’s name wrong. That’s because she’s shortly going to be the focus of a biopic starring Natalie Portman, which follows her fight for equal rights before she was elevated to the court in 1993.