Liberal US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has admitted she sometimes weeps after losses on major cases before the conservative-led panel.
“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried,” the Bronx-born jurist recalled at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University last week.
“There have been those days. And there are likely to be more,” she said.
Sotomayor, one of three liberal justices on the high court, spoke at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study while receiving the Radcliffe Medal on Friday.
She declined to specify which cases in particular drove her to tears, but she underscored the need to keep fighting, even in moments of despair.
“There are moments when I’m deeply, deeply sad,” she said. “And there are moments when, yes, even I feel desperation. We all do. But you have to own it. You have to accept it. You have to shed the tears, and then you have to wipe them and get up and fight some more.”
The 69-year-old judge has previously discussed her deep frustrations with the court since its shift to the right, ushered in by former President Donald Trump’s appointment of three conservative justices.
She echoed a similar sentiment in January while speaking at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, reflecting that “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,” she said at the time.
During those January remarks, Sotomayor also spoke about the demanding workload that justices on the nation’s highest court face.
“Cases are bigger. They’re more demanding. The number of amici [participating parties] are greater, and you know that our emergency calendar is so much more active — I’m tired,” she said at the time, according Bloomberg Law.
“There used to be a time when we had a good chunk of the summer break. Not anymore. The emergency calendar is busy almost on a weekly basis,” the justice said.
Sotomayor has been under pressure from progressives to step down so that President Biden can name a replacement, after liberals expressed concerns about her health and age. Sotomayor, a diabetic, has been forced to travel with a medic in the past.
Those pushing for her to retire have been haunted by late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on the bench in 2020, enabling Trump to name her replacement and gain a conservative seat.
Sotomayor’s remarks last week come as the Supreme Court weighs a bevy of high-profile cases this term, including two on abortion and Trump’s prosecution-immunity claims.
On Thursday, she was once again in the minority on a key redistricting case out of South Carolina in which the high court sided with Republicans 6-3. The court ruled that legitimate partisan goals, rather than racial motives, fueled the district drawing process.
Sotomayor was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama in 2009. She is the first Latina to serve as a justice and the third woman.