Sotomayor Chides High Court’s ‘Impotence’ on Affirmative Action

Justice Sonia Sotomayor rebuked Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling effectively barring affirmative action, the first time in four years a justice explained from the bench the reasoning for parting ways with the majority.

An emotional Justice Elena Kagan was the last justice to read from her dissent in 2019 in the partisan gerrymandering case, Rucho v. Common Cause. The justices in 2020 paused reading their rulings because of the pandemic and only resumed this term.

Sotomayor chided her conservative colleagues for voting as a group to effectively overturn decades of precedent allowing for the limited consideration of race in collage ...