U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor urged students not to lose faith in politics amid the growing divisions in the nation during a Boston University lecture Friday.
“I refuse to be a bystander,” Sotomayor said. “I get up every morning ready to fight, every morning to dissent this vehemently as I humanly can and to scream from the mountaintops, ‘No.’ ”
Sotomayor, 71, is a consistently liberal voice on a court that has grown increasingly conservative. Since she was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2009, she’s written opinions and dissents on cases about campaign finance laws (Citizens United v. FEC), social issues such as same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), and most recently on a case concerning racial profiling in immigration policing (Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem).
The justice addressed law students as part of the annual Max M. Shapiro Lecture, sporting a casual, yet striking look complete with red-striped Nike Dunk sneakers. Boston University has also seen other notable legal figures visit, including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2023 and retired Justice Stephen Breyer in 2013.
In conversation with her former law clerk Cesar Lopez-Morales, a BU alumnus, she cautioned students against cynicism or disengagement if they disagree with the current political party in power.
Sotomayor gave glimpses into her life inside the court and on how she maintains a rapport with colleagues, even when she vehemently disagrees with them.
“ Like me, every one of them is devoted to their families, to their spouses, to their children,” she said.
“ Everybody is a human being,” she went on. “You have to stop thinking that when somebody thinks something different than you do, that they’re necessarily bad people because of that. And good people do bad things.”
She acknowledged that being in the minority on high-profile rulings can be draining.
“There are moments I’m angry, deeply angry, and other moments I’m deeply, deeply sad,” she said. “But I also realize I have to live with them … and to do that, I have to hold on to the humanness of us as a group.”
Sotomayor, who was the first Latina appointed to the court and third-ever woman, noted that her dissents have grown more frequent in recent years as the court’s conservative majority reshapes constitutional law on issues including abortion, voting rights and executive power.
Still, she emphasized that collegiality doesn’t mean complacency.
“I think most of my colleagues like me and they like me because I like them as people, even though I think they’re crazy as judges,” Sotomayor said.
Her lecture also turned to the work of opinion-writing and dissent.
“So you have to always ask that first question: who am I writing for” she said. Sometimes, her audience is lower court judges, giving them addition ideas to consider. In other cases, Sotomayor said her dissents are written for a future court to cite — when they reconsider cases she believes her court decided wrong.
She pointed to the 2024 case over presidential immunity, Trump v. United States. The court ruled 6-3 that presidents can receive immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts,” concerning President Trump’s role during the events during the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol.
“Presidential immunity, in my judgment, was a made-up doctrine,” she said. She said she hoped future generations of judges will find the decision “lawless.”
Sotomayor recounted the lessons she’s learned through the years about maintaining empathy and perspective as a judge.
“The only thing we can do as human judges is not to presume that the law is without consequence or that what we think is right is felt as right by others,” she said. “Because everybody who loses in a courtroom feels they lost something.”
She noted that the reason people are in court is because they thought they had right to something that someone else told them they don’t have.
“I know I’m always, always thinking not about the winners, but about the losers,” Sotomayor said. “Because once I forget them, then I’ve stopped being a human being.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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