Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday seemed to throw a sidelong barb at Attorney General Pam Bondi for foolishly suggesting the existence of a “hate speech” exception to free speech.
As the far-right wages an ongoing crusade against people accused of mocking slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Bondi said on a Monday podcast that “hate speech” is not free speech. The Department of Justice, she vowed, will “target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
The sentiment was widely criticized, including by MAGA commentators, for undermining the First Amendment. Bondi attempted to walk back her statement on Tuesday.
During a Tuesday morning panel at New York Law School, Sotomayor seemingly took aim at Bondi, but did not mention the attorney general by name.
“Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school failed,” the liberal justice reportedly said. “If any student who becomes a lawyer hasn’t been taught civics, then that law school has failed,” she added. “Because it is for that system that you’re working as a lawyer.”
Sotomayor also raised concerns about people’s awareness, or lack thereof, of constraints on the power of the executive branch—evidently referencing Donald Trump, without mentioning him by name, either.
“Do we understand what the difference is between a king and a president?” Sotomayor said (a distinction that was blurred by the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling on presidential immunity in United States v. Trump, as she warned in her dissent at the time). “I think if people understood these things from the beginning, they would be more informed as to what would be important in a democracy.”
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