Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor Proclaims She Has Been Traumatized by Colleagues’ Conservative Rulings

BRONX JUSTICE: President Barack Obama (L) announces federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor (R) as his choice to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court during an announcement in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday. Getty Images

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor told a group of Berkeley law students that she was traumatized by the conservative rulings of colleagues. 

According to a CNN report, she said she lives “in frustration.” 

“And as you heard, every loss truly traumatizes me in my stomach and in my heart,” she said. “But I have to get up the next morning and keep on fighting.”

Justice Sotomayor was appointed to the Supreme Court by former President Barack Obama in 2009 and is known to be the third woman and first Hispanic to serve.

In 1992, former President George H.W. Bush made her a federal judge when he appointed her to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where she served until 1998 when she was appointed by former President Bill Clinton as a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020, the liberal bloc of the high court was whittled down to three left-leaning justices.

Former President Donald Trump’s appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett made the court a conservative super-majority.

In response to a question from the school dean referencing students’ discouragement of current rulings, Justice Sotomayor said she’s not “entitled to despair.”

“Change never happens on its own,” she said. “Change happens because people care about moving the arc of the universe toward justice, and it can take time, and it can take frustration.”

‘Step Down’

Journalist and former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research Josh Barro told CNN that if Justice Sotomayor is “concerned about the political balance on the court,” it would be a strategic move to “step down in favor of somebody younger.”

“She’s 69 years old,” Mr. Barro said. “She’s been on the court for 15 years. It’s quite possible the Democrats will lose control of the Senate in the next election and who knows how long it could be before there’s a next opportunity for a Democratic president to make a new appointment into the seat that she sits in.”

He added that the late Justice Antonin Scalia, appointed by Ronald Reagan, “did not make it to 2017,” which he said “would have been the next opportunity.”

“Now, he had Mitch McConnel running interference for him, but it can be more than a decade before there’s another opportunity with a Democratic Senate,” he said. “It seems like it would be the right time strategically for her to step down in favor of somebody younger.”

Affirmative Action

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Justice Sotomayor partially attributed her admission to Princeton to affirmative action, which—in a Republican majority of 6-3—the Supreme Court ruled against in June 2023.

The case centered around the admission policies at the public University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the private Harvard University.

In Justice Sotomayor’s 70-page dissent, she stated that the Supreme Court has rolled back “decades of precedent and momentous progress.”

“It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”

‘Shell-Shocked’

In 2023, Justice Sotomayor spoke before the Berkeley School of Law and referred to the Roe v. Wade decision, saying that she was “shell-shocked” after the decision.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a ruling that put the rights of regulated abortion back into the hands of the states based on the opinion that there was no constitutional right to abortion.

“I did have a sense of despair about the direction my court was going,” she said.

At the Berkeley event, she said that her “originalist colleagues” have found “new ways to interpret the Constitution” in the form of respinning their intended meaning “that some of us believed were well established.”

Despite this, she said she could still have a “civil conversation” with the conservative Justice Thomas, whom she said believes in the strict interpretation of the Constitution, adding that he’s “the only justice who knows the name of every employee in the Supreme Court.”

‘Dysfunctional Congress’

She told the students that the knowledge that they are the “final word on constitutional law” is “frightening” and more toilsome given what she called the “dysfunctional Congress,” whose debated laws must be interpreted by the court.

Justice Sotomayor was also critical of some criminal defense lawyers whom she said have underperformed when presenting their case before the court. 

“I can’t tell you how often I’ll look at Neil Gorsuch, and I’ll send him a note and say, ‘I want to kill that lawyer,’” she said. “Because he or she didn’t give up that case. Because by the time you come to the Supreme Court, it’s not about your client anymore. It’s not about their case. It’s about how that legal issue will affect the development of law and how you pitch it—if you pitch it too broadly, you’re gonna kill the claims of a whole swath of people.”

Jack Phillips and Tom Ozimek contributed to this report.