The New York Times’ feature on the Court’s liberal justices isn’t really about jurisprudence. It’s about emotional management. Beneath the biographical polish—Kagan the strategist, Jackson the crusader, Sotomayor the empath—the language reveals something deeper: how the progressive establishment narrates its own powerlessness.
Consider the phrasing. The liberals are in an “existential dilemma,” “badly outnumbered,” struggling to “safeguard institutions or protest their decline.” That isn’t legal analysis; it’s therapy. The Court becomes a microcosm of the left’s post-Trump neurosis—a place where losing is permanent, and the only question is how nobly one processes it.
The framing turns jurisprudence into politics by other means. Daniel Epps of Washington University likens the liberals’ situation to war: “If you’re outgunned, do you try diplomacy or appeasement, or make a noble charge and get blown away?” The metaphor gives away the game. These justices aren’t portrayed as interpreters of law but as combatants. “Good faith” becomes a battlefield virtue, and “appeasement” the sin of moderation.
The vocabulary of power replaces the language of law. Kagan must figure out how to “exert influence.” Jackson wants to “win cases.” Victories are “rare,” not because precedent or text forecloses them, but because the scoreboard reads 6-3. When the Times praises Kagan for “protecting the power of federal agencies,” it accidentally states the ideology outright: the administrative state, not the Constitution, is the thing being defended.
Even empathy gets politicized. Sotomayor “focuses on the impact on real people”—as if her colleagues deal with imaginary ones. The implication is moral superiority through sentiment, not reasoning. “Real people” means favored constituencies; “rule of law” is what those constituencies need protection from.
And when Jackson “aims at the right side of the Court,” dissent becomes ordnance. The journalist’s verbs—aimed, warned, accused—recast argument as attack. That may thrill progressive readers but it corrodes the very idea that law is a discipline of persuasion.
Perhaps the most revealing line comes near the end, from Professor Leah Litman: “What are you preserving capital and goodwill for at this point?” In any healthy institution, the answer would be obvious—goodwill is the oxygen that keeps it legitimate. To treat collegiality as weakness is to admit that one no longer believes in the Court as a court at all.
That is the quiet tragedy running through the piece. The Times isn’t covering judges; it’s eulogizing faith in judging itself. The liberal bloc has come to see restraint as complicity and persuasion as futility. Their sympathizers in the press can only translate that despair into the language of noble suffering.
If the Court is now a “sealed world,” as Kantor writes, it’s because the country’s most influential narrators no longer speak in constitutional terms. They speak the dialect of loss—one that confuses moral emotion with legal reasoning, and therapy with truth.