Sonia Maria Sotomayor (born June 25, 1954) is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009 and has served since August 8, 2009. She is the third woman to hold the position. Sotomayor is the first woman of color, first Hispanic, and first Latina member of the Court. Sotomayor was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. Sotomayor graduated with honors from Princeton University in 1976 and received her law degree from Yale Law School in 1979. –Wikipedia

DESIGN NOTE
I have been pondering a design for Sonia Sotomayor for several years. I was impressed with her compassion, drive, and brilliance after reading her 2013 memoir. However, it was not clear to me what words to use for her “power.” I had thought to use “LISTEN” but was disuaded by someone who used to work for her who told me that Sotomayor is notorious for interrupting people. Sigh. Then recently someone came in to my Female Power hut at Eastern Market and, looking at my RBG “DISSENT” button, told me, “I would love a button with Sotomayor on it that says ‘DISSENT.”’ (She was refering to the dissent quoted below.) “Especially if it were in Spanish!” Well, I know a good idea when I hear one, and this also solved the problem I’ve stated above. I’m starting with a perSISTER print, and a button will be coming. 

I found three ways to say “I dissent” in Spanish, and a lawyer friend helped me find the official judicial phrasing by looking up Supreme Court decisions published in Puerto Rico. 

I found out that the Supreme Court publishes their decisions using the typeface Century Schoolbook, so that is the face I used to typeset the dissent appearing behind the judge in this print. The text reads:

The court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.

Last night, the court silently acquiesced in a state’s enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents. Today, the court belatedly explains that it declined to grant relief because of procedural complexities of the state’s own invention. Because the court’s failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas, I dissent.

In May 2021, the Texas legislature enacted SB8 (the act). The act, which took effect statewide at midnight on 1 September, makes it unlawful for physicians to perform abortions if they either detect cardiac activity in an embryo or fail to perform a test to detect such activity. This equates to a near-categorical ban on abortions beginning six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period, before many women realize they are pregnant, and months before fetal viability. According to the applicants, who are abortion providers and advocates in Texas, the act immediately prohibits care for at least 85% of Texas abortion patients and will force many abortion clinics to close.

The act is clearly unconstitutional under existing precedents. The respondents do not even try to argue otherwise. Nor could they: no federal appellate court has upheld such a comprehensive prohibition on abortions before viability under current law.

The Texas legislature was well aware of this binding precedent. To circumvent it, the legislature took the extraordinary step of enlisting private citizens to do what the state could not. The act authorizes any private citizen to file a lawsuit against any person who provides an abortion in violation of the act, “aids or abets” such an abortion (including by paying for it) regardless of whether they know the abortion is prohibited under the act, or even intends to engage in such conduct. Courts are required to enjoin the defendant from engaging in these actions in the future and to award the private-citizen plaintiff at least $10,000 in “statutory damages” for each forbidden abortion performed or aided by the defendant. In effect, the Texas legislature has deputized the state’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.

The legislature fashioned this scheme because federal constitutional challenges to state laws ordinarily are brought against state officers who are in charge of enforcing. By prohibiting state officers from enforcing the act directly and relying instead on citizen bounty hunters, the legislature sought to make it more complicated for federal courts to enjoin the act on a statewide basis.

Taken together, the act is a breathtaking act of defiance—of the constitution, of this court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas. But over six weeks after the applicants filed suit to prevent the act from taking effect, a fifth circuit panel abruptly stayed all proceedings before the district court and vacated a preliminary injunction hearing that was scheduled to begin on Monday. The applicants requested emergency relief from this court, but the court said nothing. The act took effect at midnight last night.

From Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in Whole Woman’s Health et al v Austin Reeve Jackson, Judge, et al, on application for injunctive relief. She was joined by Justices Breyer and Kagan. This text has been lightly edited to remove some legal citations. This is quoted directly from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/02/sonia-sotomayor-dissent-texas-abortion-ban-law-supreme-court

This dissent, this case, this new “originalist” Supreme Court, is about much more than denying reproductive rights for women. The historian, Heather Cox Richardson, points out in her letter of September 3, 2021,  “A state has undermined the power of the federal government to protect civil rights. It has given individuals who disagree with one particular right the power to take it away from their neighbors. But make no mistake: there is no reason that this mechanism couldn’t be used to undermine much of the civil rights legislation of the post–World War II years.”

This print was published in September 2021.

FURTHER SOURCES
A good summary of her legal career so far:
“Sonia Sotomayor.” Oyez, www.oyez.org/justices/sonia_sotomayor. Accessed 24 Sep. 2021.

Memoir: My Beloved World, 2013.

The image of Sotomayor in this artwork is based on a photograph © Elena Seibert. The photographer does not have any responsibility for the message of this print.