Justice Sonia Sotomayor said on Wednesday she anticipates a lot of legal “disappointments” going forward, a prediction that comes weeks after the Supreme Court declined to block Texas’s new abortion law over her dissent.
Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, urged a group of law students to take matters into their own hands and work to change laws they oppose as judicial conservatives maintain a majority of the high court.
“There is going to be a lot of disappointment in the law, a huge amount,” Sotomayor said during an event hosted by the American Bar Association. “Look at me. Look at my dissents.”
“You know, I can’t change Texas’s law,” Sotomayor also said, “but you can, and everyone else who may or may not like it can go out there and be lobbying forces in changing laws that you don’t like.”
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The Supreme Court declined on procedural grounds a request by abortion providers to block the law earlier this month, which outlaws abortions at the stage of gestation when cardiac activity can be detected, or about six weeks.
Sotomayor, along with fellow Democratic-appointed Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan as well as Chief Justice John Roberts, would have blocked the law. Each issued their own dissent in the case.
Sotomayor called the 5-4 decision “stunning” and described Texas’s law as “flagrantly unconstitutional” based on the court’s standing abortion precedents.
Democrats, including President Joe Biden, slammed the decision as well, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought the Women’s Health Protection Act for a vote afterward to codify abortion protections in federal law. That legislation passed the chamber on Sept. 24.
The Justice Department is pursuing its own challenge of the Texas law.
The fight over abortion is expected to become more fierce in the coming months, as the Supreme Court is slated to take up a direct legal challenge to Roe v. Wade and subsequent abortion precedents.
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The high court’s fall term begins Oct. 4.
