Reintroducing Sonia Sotomayor
Article

Reintroducing Sonia Sotomayor

What can the most liberal justice accomplish on the most conservative court in decades?

Irin Carmon
New York Magazine, 2021
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Editorial Rating

9

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The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t make Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s life any simpler, Irin Carmon reports in New York Magazine. Sotomayor likes talking with her clerks. She likes being among people, and the only crowds she was in for months were at the funeral of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The Justice engages in lively debate during oral arguments in the Supreme Court, which aren’t the same when they’re reduced to live-streamed phone calls. Over a decade into her tenure, Sonia Sotomayor, now 66, has become the dominant liberal voice on the Supreme Court.

Summary

Sonia Sotomayor may replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a liberal voice on a conservative Supreme Court.

United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was not happy in the pandemic. She likes engaging with people. A New Yorker from the Bronx, she likes to go to Times Square on New Year’s Eve to oversee the famous crystal ball drop. But she’s 66 and has diabetes, and so she needed to be careful. 

Appointed by President Barack Obama, Sonia Sotomayor has served on the Supreme Court bench for more than a decade and has provided a fierce voice for liberalism. With the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she became the effective minority leader. And if octogenarian Stephen Breyer retires, Sotomayor will become the Court’s senior justice, as well as the opposition leader against conservative justices.

Early on, some people disparaged Sotomayor as not brilliant, but they’ve since retracted that opinion.

Over the ...

About the Author

Israeli-American journalist and commentator Irin Carmon is a senior correspondent at New York Magazine and a CNN contributor. She is the co-author of Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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