adminSupreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor opened up on Monday about the “frustration” she said she experiences daily as the high court’s conservative supermajority continues to move the country further to the right.
“I live in frustration. And as you heard, every loss truly traumatizes me in my stomach and in my heart. But I have to get up the next morning and keep on fighting,” Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal member, said at an event at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.
“How can you look at those people and say that you’re entitled to despair? You’re not. I’m not,” she said, responding to a question from the school’s dean about how students there increasingly feel discouraged by the current court and how it’s shaping American law. “Change never happens on its own. Change happens because people care about moving the arc of the universe toward justice, and it can take time and it can take frustration.”
The comments from Sotomayor come as the majority-conservative high court is poised to issue rulings on a number of contentious issues, including gun rights and the power of federal agencies. The court’s liberal members have found themselves on the losing side of numerous blockbuster cases in recent years after former President Donald Trump appointed three conservatives justices, and Sotomayor has often publicly bemoaned her colleagues’ decisions in those matters.
Just last week, after the court cleared the way for Alabama to carry out the first-ever execution of a death row inmate by nitrogen gas, Sotomayor voiced her opposition to the move in a strongly worded dissent that underscored her “deep sadness” over the court’s order.
“Having failed to kill Smith on its first attempt, Alabama has selected him as its ‘guinea pig’ to test a method of execution never attempted before,” she wrote in dissent. “This Court yet again permits Alabama to ‘experiment … with a human life.’”
Liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson also publicly dissented from the court’s order that allowed Kenneth Smith’s execution to move forward.
During Monday’s event, Sotomayor waded into other topics related to the court, including the impact of oral arguments on a justice’s vote. At one point, she criticized some criminal defense attorneys who she said have occasionally done a poor job of advocating before the high court.
“I can’t tell you how often I’ll look at (Justice) Neil Gorsuch and I’ll send him a note and say, ‘I want to kill that lawyer.’ 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,” she said. “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.”
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