The three liberal Supreme Court justices currently serving are Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. All three were appointed by Democratic presidents and sit opposite a six-member conservative majority. That 6-3 split means the liberal wing cannot control outcomes on its own, but the three vote together with striking consistency and have used sharp dissents to challenge the majority on executive power, individual rights, and the authority of federal agencies.
Sonia Sotomayor
Sotomayor is the senior member of the liberal wing and, by most measures of judicial ideology, the most liberal justice on the current Court. She made history in 2009 as the first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court, having grown up in a public housing project in the Bronx before earning degrees from Princeton and Yale Law School.1Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino. Sonia Sotomayor Before joining the Court, she worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, then served as a federal judge at both the trial and appellate levels, sitting on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and later the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.2The White House. Background on Judge Sonia Sotomayor
President Barack Obama nominated her to replace the retiring Justice David Souter.3United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court – Sonia Sotomayor She is known for emotionally forceful dissents, especially in cases involving criminal justice, immigration, and racial discrimination. Her dissent rate has climbed since the Court shifted to a 6-3 conservative majority, and she has been in the majority less often than any other sitting justice in several recent terms.
Elena Kagan
Kagan took a different path to the bench. She never served as a judge before her appointment, instead building her career in academia and the executive branch. She was the first woman to serve as Dean of Harvard Law School, a role she took on in 2003. Before that she taught at the University of Chicago Law School and worked as a policy advisor in the Clinton White House. Obama later appointed her as the 45th Solicitor General, the government’s top advocate before the Supreme Court.4United States Department of Justice. Solicitor General – Elena Kagan
Obama nominated Kagan to the Court in 2010 to succeed the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.5Congress.gov. Nomination of Elena Kagan for The Supreme Court of the United States Of the three liberal justices, Kagan sits closest to the Court’s ideological center. She occasionally joins conservative colleagues in cases where statutory text points clearly in one direction, which gives her a somewhat higher rate of appearing in the majority. Her years arguing cases before the Court as Solicitor General show in her writing, which leans toward analytical precision rather than the moral urgency that often marks Sotomayor’s opinions.
Ketanji Brown Jackson
Jackson is the newest justice and the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court, taking her seat on June 30, 2022. Her professional background is unlike anyone else’s on the current bench. She spent two years as a federal public defender handling criminal appeals for people who could not afford counsel, giving her firsthand experience with a side of the justice system most justices have only seen from the other direction.6United States Sentencing Commission. News Release She also served as a vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the federal body that develops sentencing guidelines for criminal cases.
Before reaching the Supreme Court, Jackson served as a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., and then on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. She had earlier clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, and it was Breyer’s retirement that created the vacancy she filled. President Joe Biden nominated her in 2022.7Congress.gov. Nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson for Supreme Court of the United States Jackson has quickly become a bold voice on the Court, writing lengthy solo opinions in addition to joining the other liberal justices in dissent. Her criminal defense background surfaces most clearly in cases involving the rights of the accused and the scope of federal sentencing power.
What Makes a Justice Liberal
In Supreme Court shorthand, “liberal” generally describes justices who favor broad protections for individual rights, support federal regulatory authority, and are more willing to read the Constitution as a document whose application evolves with society. That last idea is sometimes called living constitutionalism, and it stands in contrast to originalism, the approach favored by the Court’s conservative justices, which focuses on what the Constitution’s words meant when they were first written.
The liberal justices also tend to use a method called purposivism when reading federal statutes. Rather than focusing strictly on literal text, purposivism asks what problem Congress was trying to solve. When wording is ambiguous, this approach looks at the law’s broader goals to figure out how it should apply. The conservative majority generally prefers textualism, which sticks closer to the words on the page regardless of underlying legislative intent. These are not just academic preferences. They produce real differences in outcomes, particularly in cases about whether federal agencies have the power to regulate industries, protect the environment, or enforce civil rights laws.
On the issues that most people associate with the Court, the three liberal justices have consistently voted to protect abortion access, uphold gun regulations, support voting rights protections, and defend the authority of federal agencies. They jointly dissented in the 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and they have opposed the conservative majority’s expansion of Second Amendment protections.
How Often the Three Vote Together
The three liberal justices vote together far more often than casual observers might expect. During the 2024–2025 term, Kagan agreed with Sotomayor in 92 percent of cases decided by written opinion and with Jackson in 89 percent. In closely divided cases decided 5-4 or 6-3, the numbers were even higher: Kagan and Sotomayor agreed 95 percent of the time, and Kagan and Jackson agreed in every single closely divided case. That cohesion makes the liberal bloc the tightest voting unit on the Court.
The flip side of that unity is frequent dissent. With three justices consistently on one side and six on the other, the minority spends a lot of time writing opinions that do not control the outcome. Sotomayor, as the senior liberal justice, often writes or assigns the principal dissent. Jackson has also shown a willingness to author separate dissenting opinions that stake out her own reasoning, even when she agrees with Sotomayor and Kagan on the result. To form a majority, the liberal justices need to pull at least two conservative votes, which occasionally happens when Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Kavanaugh breaks from the conservative wing.
Recent Notable Dissents
The liberal justices’ dissents in the 2024–2025 term focused heavily on executive power and the separation of powers, reflecting the major legal battles between the Trump administration and federal courts.
Trump v. CASA
In one of the term’s most significant rulings, the Court held 6-3 that federal judges likely lack the authority to issue universal injunctions, which are court orders that block a government policy nationwide rather than only for the specific plaintiffs in the case. The case involved an executive order on birthright citizenship that multiple lower courts had blocked. Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson, wrote a dissent arguing that the majority was stripping courts of an equitable power rooted in centuries of legal tradition. The dissent called the birthright citizenship order “patently unconstitutional” under the Fourteenth Amendment and warned that the ruling was “an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.”8Supreme Court of the United States. Trump v. CASA, Inc.
McMahon v. New York
The Court granted an emergency stay that paused a lower court order blocking the administration’s effort to drastically reduce the Department of Education’s workforce. The Secretary of Education had announced plans to eliminate nearly half the department’s employees, and the President signed an executive order directing the Secretary to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of the department. Sotomayor, again joined by Kagan and Jackson, dissented sharply, writing that “only Congress has the power to abolish the Department” and that “when the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.”9Supreme Court of the United States. McMahon v. New York
The Emergency Docket
Beyond merits decisions, the liberal justices have been vocal critics of how the Court uses its emergency docket, sometimes called the “shadow docket.” These are cases decided on an expedited basis, often without full briefing or oral argument, where the Court grants or denies emergency stays of lower court orders. The liberal bloc has repeatedly objected that the conservative majority uses this process to let major government policies take effect before courts can fully evaluate whether they are legal. Jackson specifically criticized her conservative colleagues for what she described as roughly two dozen orders from the 2024–2025 term that allowed executive actions to proceed after lower courts had found them likely unlawful. The complaint is straightforward: when the Court short-circuits the normal litigation process on its emergency docket, the public never gets a fully reasoned opinion explaining why.
Why the Liberal Wing Has Stayed at Three
Obama’s two appointments came in consecutive years: Sotomayor in 2009 to replace David Souter, and Kagan in 2010 to replace John Paul Stevens. Both replaced justices who had themselves been part of the Court’s liberal wing, so these appointments maintained the existing balance rather than shifting it. Biden’s appointment of Jackson in 2022 followed the same pattern, replacing the retiring Stephen Breyer.
That history explains why the liberal wing has stayed at three for over a decade. Democratic presidents have only had the chance to replace justices who were already on the liberal side of the Court. The conservative majority grew to six because Republican presidents appointed justices who replaced both conservative members (Scalia’s seat going to Gorsuch) and a swing vote (Kennedy’s seat going to Kavanaugh), plus filled the seat that Senate Republicans held open through the final year of the Obama presidency (Ginsburg’s seat going to Barrett after Republicans reversed their own precedent on election-year confirmations). The result is a Court whose liberal minority reflects not just ideology but the timing and politics of vacancies over the past two decades.
All Supreme Court justices serve life terms, so the current 6-3 balance will hold until a justice retires or dies. As of early 2026, none of the three liberal justices have announced plans to step down. Sotomayor, the oldest of the three at 71, has faced the most public speculation about retirement, but sources close to her have said she has no plans to resign.