Who Is the Most Liberal Justice on the Supreme Court?

Mathew Habib - Chief

January 2026

When people ask who the most liberal justice on the Supreme Court is, they usually expect a single name. But the truth is more nuanced. Right now, the Court’s liberal wing is led by three justices: Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The real question is not whether they are liberal, but how they express that liberalism.

If we were to rank these justices from least to most liberal, the order would be Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, with Sotomayor and Jackson very close and Jackson holding a slight edge.

Justice Kagan is the least liberal of the three, though that does not make her moderate. Her approach is strategic and institutional. She often focuses on narrow legal reasoning, coalition-building, and writing opinions that can attract broader support. Kagan’s liberalism is careful and disciplined. She tends to prioritize protecting precedent and limiting damage rather than pushing the Court as far left as possible in any single case.

Justice Sotomayor represents a more expressive form of liberalism. Her dissents are direct, emotionally grounded, and often explicitly concerned with race, inequality, and democratic erosion. She is more willing than Kagan to call out injustice in clear moral terms, even when she knows the majority will not follow her. For years, Sotomayor has been the Court’s most vocal liberal critic of conservative power.

Justice Jackson, though newer to the Court, has quickly positioned herself at the far end of the liberal spectrum. Her voting record aligns closely with Sotomayor’s, but her reasoning often goes a step further by interrogating systems rather than outcomes alone. She consistently asks how laws operate in practice and who bears their consequences. That focus on structural impact places her slightly ahead in terms of liberal approach.

The distinction between Sotomayor and Jackson is subtle. Sotomayor leads with moral urgency. Jackson leads with institutional analysis and lived consequence. In many cases, their votes are identical. The difference lies in emphasis, not ideology.

I think this ranking matters because it shows that liberalism on the Court is not monolithic. It includes strategy, moral clarity, and structural critique. Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson each embody a different dimension of liberal jurisprudence, and together they form a more complete counterweight to the Court’s conservative majority.

If asked for a simple answer, the most liberal justice on the Supreme Court right now is likely Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, but only by a narrow margin. What matters more is that her rise reflects an evolution in how liberal ideas are argued and defended at the highest level of American law.

For students and young readers trying to make sense of the Court, that evolution is worth paying attention to.