Fix the Court posts an audio recording of Justice Sotomayor speaking at an interview at the University of Zurich in July of 2024. Apparently, Fix the Court just obtained this recording recently. A Justice’s talk at a university is usually a public event, but sometimes these events are done under Chatham House rules, meaning that the remarks are not supposed to be repeated. I don’t know what the context was in this respect for this interview or why the audio has just now become available.

According to the transcript, her comments about term limits for the Court included these remarks:

In the American system, the problem with a term limit is how will they institute it, because I am promised my job for life, and that can’t be taken away constitutionally — I don’t believe even with a constitutional amendment — because you cannot have a retroactive law changing something that you’ve earned.

So that means that a current court at the moment these term limits exist, those justices will be there for as long as they want, so you might not get the value of term limits in the United States because of that inherent difficulty.

I do not agree that it would be unconstitutional to adopt term limits via a constitutional amendment that would apply to the sitting Justices. But for those who think the Supreme Court would uphold the constitutionality of a statute imposing term limits on the sitting Justices, these remarks should certainly be sobering.