Sotomayor’s biting dissent: Ruling rolls back ‘decades of precedent and momentous progress’

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the Supreme Court majority decision Thursday that gutted the use of affirmative action on college admissions.

In a fiery dissent that Sotomayor read from the bench to underscore its historic significance, the liberal justice wrote that the ruling “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”

“In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter,” Sotomayor said in the 69-page dissent.

“The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society,” she added.

Sotomayor’s six conservative colleagues on the high court ruled Thursday that Harvard University’s and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s use of race in admissions violates the 14th Amendment.

The liberal justice slammed the majority’s use of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in their ruling, describing it as “nothing but revisionist history” and an “affront” to the legacy of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case before the Supreme Court.

Marshall was also the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court.

Sotomayor added that the ruling’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment is “grounded in the illusion that racial inequality was a problem of a different generation.”

“Entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today,” Sotomayor said. “That is true for society writ large and, more specifically, for Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC), two institutions with a long history of racial exclusion.”

“Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal,” she continued. “What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.”

Sotomayor also noted that her conservative colleagues relied on arguments found in the dissenting opinions of previous rulings, suggesting that these “lost arguments” are not grounds for overturning precedent and further degrade confidence in the court.

“When proponents of those arguments, greater now in number on the Court, return to fight old battles anew, it betrays an unrestrained disregard for precedent,” the justice said.

“It fosters the People’s suspicions that ‘bedrock principles are founded … in the proclivities of individuals’ on this Court, not in the law, and it degrades ‘the integrity of our constitutional system of government,’” she added.

This story was updated at 12:21 p.m.