Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the senior member of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing, said on Friday that judges must remain “fearlessly independent” if the rule of law is to survive.
Her remarks, made in a packed auditorium at Georgetown University Law Center, were at once cautious and forceful. She did not address particular controversies arising from the Trump administration’s actions testing the conventional understanding of presidential power, many of which appear likely to land at the Supreme Court. But she made plain that her observations about the fragility of the justice system addressed current events.
She bemoaned, for instance, “the fact that some of our public leaders are lawyers making statements challenging the rule of law.”
She was interviewed by the law school’s dean, William M. Treanor, who interspersed his questions with ones that had been submitted by students. He started the conversation by characterizing those questions, alluding to recent efforts by the Trump administration to punish major law firms and its battles with courts over its blitz of executive orders.
“As our students prepare to join the legal profession, they are confronting genuine unsettling questions about the durability of that profession and of the law itself,” he said. “The most commonly asked question was the role of courts in safeguarding the rule of law.”
Justice Sotomayor answered in general terms, citing reference works and experts. She said she had consulted with Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, a former member of the Supreme Court of Canada, about judges’ obligations, quoting her response: “They need to remain fearlessly independent, protective of rights and ensure that the state is respectful of both.”
Justice Sotomayor said she “couldn’t think of a better answer than that.”
Dean Treanor said those comments were timely, and the justice agreed.
She returned to the role of judges in curbing excesses.
“Judicial independence is critical to everyone’s freedom, because arbitrary power is just that,” she said. “And it means that anyone is going to be subject to unfairness at someone else’s whim.”
Justice Sotomayor’s remarks came in a charged setting. Georgetown’s law school was the subject of an unusual inquiry from Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. In a letter to Dean Treanor, Mr. Martin demanded that the law school end all efforts at achieving diversity, equity and inclusion.
“It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote D.E.I.,” Mr. Martin wrote. “This is unacceptable.”
He said he had started an inquiry and asked the dean two questions: “First, have you eliminated all D.E.I. from your school and its curriculum? Second, if D.E.I. is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”
In the meantime, Mr. Martin indicated that his office would not hire students and others affiliated with the law school.
Dean Treanor, a constitutional scholar and former Justice Department official, responded by letter that the Constitution “guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it.”
Indeed, he wrote, “given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the university’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution.”
Justice Sotomayor did not discuss that exchange or President Trump’s executive orders retaliating against prominent law firms, stripping their lawyers of security clearances, barring them from entering federal buildings and discouraging federal officials from interacting with the firms.
Justice Sotomayor was once a summer associate at one of those firms, Paul Weiss, which struck a deal with the administration, prompting criticism that it had sacrificed its principles to protect its bottom line.
She was also the first beneficiary of affirmative action to defend the practice from the Supreme Court bench, citing that experience when she summarized in emphatic and impassioned tones her dissent from a 2014 ruling upholding Michigan’s ban on using race in admissions decisions at the state’s public universities.
“Race matters,” she wrote, “because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’ ”
Justice Sotomayor, 70, was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009. She said on Friday that the court has taken some wrong turns over the years, singling out Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973.
“We’ve never had, except for Dobbs, another precedent where we took away a constitutional right that we granted before,” she said, adding that “people believe in the stability of the law.”
Justice Sotomayor concluded by musing, again, on judicial power.
“Those who judge should be sensitive about how our rulings affect people, because that is what we are doing,” she said. “Putting it in a colloquial term, we’re messing with your lives.”