The week after Chief Justice John Roberts defended the judiciary from President Trump's demand that a judge be impeached for ruling against him, another justice has called for ensuring that judges are "fearlessly independent." Speaking to students at Georgetown Law School on Friday evening, USA Today reports, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said independence is necessary to preserve the rule of law against threats from "arbitrary power." Such power, she said, "means that anyone is going to be subject to unfairness at someone else's whim. You have to be worried about the day that will turn on you."
Sotomayor did not mention Trump by name or refer to any specific instance of his administration and its allies contesting the authority of the courts, per the New York Times. The pushback has included talk of defying court orders as well as impeaching judges, and the administration has tried to have judges removed from cases after unfriendly rulings. The Trump administration already this term has asked the Supreme Court six times to overturn rulings by lower courts.
The justice appeared to be more directly criticizing members of Congress and the administration with legal educations who have participated in the attacks on judges, per Politico, as well as their teachers. It's more important than ever that law students learn how important judicial independence is to freedom, she said, per USA Today. "The fact that some of our public leaders are lawyers making statements challenging the rule of law, tells me that fundamentally our law schools are failing," Sotomayor said. (More Sonia Sotomayor stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
