Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she believes the Supreme Court can “regain the public’s confidence” in her first public comments since the leak of a draft opinion signaling the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Sotomayor, an appointee of former President Barack Obama and the third woman to sit on the nation’s highest court, spoke optimistically Thursday about the institution in Washington, D.C., during the American Constitution Society’s National Convention.
“I hope not for war, but through constitutional amendment, to change in legislation, towards lobbying, towards continuing the battle each day to regain the public’s confidence that we as a court, as an institution, have not lost our way,” Sotomayor told a packed crowd at the event hosted in the Marriott Marquis hotel.
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The Democratic-appointed Supreme Court justice highlighted the court’s road from the 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford all the way to the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education as her reason to believe institutions remain important, even when they make “mistakes.”
“Dred Scott is reputed to be, and I happen to agree, one of the worst decisions of the Supreme Court … but it took nearly another century before Brown v. Board of Education and a pit stop of incredible impact, Plessy v. Ferguson, blessing separate but equal, for civil rights leaders in 1954 to have finally won the battle of freedom and civil rights,” she said.
Public confidence in the Supreme Court has been at historic lows since 2020, with only 40% approval, according to a Gallup Poll from September. The poll also found that 54% of U.S. adults disagreed and 39% agreed with the high court’s decision to allow Texas’s law banning abortion procedures after 15 weeks of gestation to go into effect in December.
Sotomayor also spoke kindly of her colleague Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving justice presently on the high court. Though he is ideologically at odds with her own philosophy, Sotomayor said they share “a common understanding about people and kindness towards them.”
“Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee’s name, every one of them. And not only does he know their names, he remembers their families’ names and histories,” she said.
“He’s the first one who will go up to someone when you’re walking with him and say, ‘Is your son okay? How’s your daughter doing in college?’ He’s the first one that, when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida.”
Sotomayor did not make any comments Thursday about the May 2 leaked draft of the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, which signaled a majority of justices were poised to erode 50 years of precedent and allow states to create laws severely limiting or restricting access to abortion.
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Since the leaked opinion, Republican-appointed justices on the high court have been peppered by protests outside of their homes, prompting lawmakers in Congress to pass a bill this week that seeks to bolster security for justices amid heightened tensions and an attempted assassination against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
During December oral arguments, Sotomayor levied concerns that preceded the politically motivated antagonizing of some of the justices, asking, “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? … I don’t see how it is possible.”
