Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor urged a greater emphasis on civic engagement and education on Tuesday, questioning whether some Americans were clearly taught the distinction between a president and a king.
Speaking at New York Law School in Manhattan, the Supreme Court’s senior liberal urged people to get involved and lamented what she saw as a lack of knowledge about fundamental aspects of American law.
“Do we understand what the difference is between a king and president?” Sotomayor said at one point. “I think if people understood these things from the beginning, they would be more informed as to what would be important in a democracy in terms of what people can or should not do.”
Sotomayor did not directly address President Donald Trump or criticize his efforts to consolidate power within the executive branch. The Supreme Court is considering several appeals challenging the president’s authority to impose tariffs unilaterally, fire independent agency leaders, and cut back on congressionally approved federal spending.
Sotomayor, who was nominated to the court by President Barack Obama, has frequently dissented in similar cases over the last year.
“The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably,” she wrote in a dissent last year, after a majority of the court granted Trump broad criminal immunity for actions taken while in office. “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”
The majority of Sotomayor’s remarks on Tuesday focused on civic education rather than current events. According to Sotomayor, schools only taught the fundamentals of how the government works.
“What they didn’t teach back then was the principles that motivated the structure of government,” she told me.
The schools, she claimed, “really didn’t explain, in more than a cursory way, what the functions were between the branches and what the expectations were of service in government.”
