Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an audience at a University of Oklahoma-Tulsa event on Wednesday that some of her colleagues on the bench do not understand how the American system of government functions, according to local media reports.
Sotomayor made the comments while discussing the decline of civic education in the country. “My greatest fear is that people don’t understand our system of government. They don’t understand what the First Amendment means. They don’t understand what our system of government presumes,” she reportedly said. “Some of my colleagues don’t either by the way, and I’m not joking about that.”
Earlier in the appearance, Sotomayor walked moderators through the differing roles of judges at the district, circuit and Supreme Court levels. She described district judges as focused on resolving disputes between two parties, and circuit judges as checking for legal errors. She then contrasted that with what she portrayed as the approach of some of her Supreme Court colleagues.
“When you’re on the Supreme Court, you’re thinking about what the law should be,” Sotomayor reportedly said. “If you’re reading our opinions, many of my colleagues are not worried about what the law was. What they’re thinking about is what the law should be.”
Sotomayor also reportedly criticized the unitary executive theory, which holds that the president has inherent Article II authority over the executive branch. “That’s not what was created” by the Constitution, she said. “We created a government with checks and balances, and the unitary executive theory is overturning that balance.”
Context: Trump v. Slaughter
The unitary executive theory was central to the Supreme Court’s 2026 decision in Trump v. Slaughter, in which the court ruled 6-3 to uphold President Trump’s removal of Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission. That ruling overturned longstanding precedent limiting a president’s authority to remove members of independent agencies. Sotomayor dissented in that case.
Pattern of public remarks
Wednesday’s comments are not the first time Sotomayor has used a public appearance to address disagreements with colleagues. Earlier this year, at another event, she criticized an interim docket opinion written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh that allowed certain government immigration enforcement policies to proceed, saying, “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.” Sotomayor later issued a statement apologizing to Kavanaugh, calling her remarks “hurtful” and “inappropriate.”
Other liberal-appointed justices have made similar public comments about the court’s conservative majority. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described recent Supreme Court rulings as an “existential threat to the rule of law” at an event last year and criticized the court’s handling of interim docket cases in a speech at Yale Law School earlier this year. In a dissent from an interim docket ruling involving the Trump administration, Jackson wrote: “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. … Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.” In a more recent case involving race-based redistricting, Jackson accused colleagues of playing politics, prompting Justice Samuel Alito to say her “rhetoric … lacks restraint.”
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