For the sake of all of us, Sonia Sotomayor needs to retire from the US supreme court

Forget Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is Sonia Sotomayor who is the greatest liberal to sit on the Supreme Court in my adult lifetime. The first Latina to hold the position of justice, she has blazed a relentlessly progressive trail on the highest bench in the land.

Whether it was her lone dissent in a North Carolina voting rights case in 2016 (“the court’s conclusion… is a fiction”); her ingenious referencing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin, and W.E.B DuBois in another 2016 dissent over unreasonable searches and seizures; or her withering observation at the Dobbs oral argument in 2021 (“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?”), Sotomayor has stood head and shoulders above both her liberal and conservative colleagues on the bench for the past fifteen years.

And so it is with good reason that she has been called the “conscience of the Supreme Court” (The Nation), “the truth teller of the Supreme Court” (New York Times) and “the real liberal queen of the court” (Above the Law).

I happen to agree 100% with all of those descriptions. But - and it pains me to write these words - I also believe it is time for Justice Sotomayor to retire.

Why?

Okay, now it is time to remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To recall how RBG, who had survived two bouts of cancer, refused to quit the Court despite calls to do so from leading liberals during Barack Obama’s second term office. To hark back to her insistence, in multiple interviews, that it was “misguided” to insist she retire and that she would only stand down “when it’s time.” To recollect how, on her deathbed in 2020, she told her granddaughter that her “most fervent wish is that I will not