 In succeeding Justice Souter , Sotomayor had done little to change the philosophical and ideological balance of the Court . While many cases are decided unanimously or with different voting coalitions , Sotomayor has continued to be a reliable member of the liberal bloc of the court when the justices divide along the commonly perceived ideological lines . Specifically , her voting pattern and judicial philosophy has been in close agreement with that of Justices Breyer , Ginsburg and Kagan . During her first couple of years there , Sotomayor voted with Ginsburg and Breyer 90 percent of the time , one of the highest agreement rates on the Court . In a 2015 article titled " Ranking the Most Liberal Modern Supreme Court Justices " , Alex Greer identified Sotomayor as representing a more liberal voting pattern than both Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader <unk> . Greer placed Sotomayor as having the most liberal voting history of all the current sitting Justices , and slightly less liberal than her predecessors Thurgood Marshall and John Marshall Harlan II on the Court . 
