Some Legal Scholars Push For Justice Sonia Sotomayor To Retire

A presidential election is looming. Control of the Senate is uncertain. The window may be closing for the Democratic Party to replace the oldest Supreme Court justice nominated by a Democratic president.

Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, remembers how this story went last time, and he’s begging for a different ending.

“Sotomayor has been an outstanding justice,” he said. “But the Ruth Bader Ginsburg precedent ought to be extremely sobering. … The cost of her failing to be replaced by a Democratic president with a Democratic Senate would be catastrophic.”

At 69, Sonia Sotomayor is the oldest justice on the Supreme Court to have been picked by a Democrat. And now, Democrats may be about to lose the Senate, White House or both. But on the left, there is little open debate about whether she should retire.

The relative silence recalls the almost total lack of pressure on Ginsburg to retire exactly one decade ago. Ginsburg, seemingly betting she would outlive a Republican-held Senate and then Donald Trump’s presidency, died of pancreatic cancer at age 87, just weeks before Joe Biden won the 2020 election. When Trump nominated her replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, and she was confirmed on Oct. 26, he cemented the 6-3 conservative majority that then took less than two years to fully overturn Roe v. Wade, among other seismic jurisprudential shifts.

Fearing a repeat of history, a handful of people who were critical of Ginsburg’s judgment, are wearily reprising their warnings ― including Lucas Powe Jr. , a Supreme Court historian at the University of Texas at Austin.

“I would love to see Sotomayor retire,” Powe said. “I would love to trade her for a 50-year-old justice.”

Outside of a handful