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There’s 50 million students who … will benefit from this, who today will struggle. Many of them don’t have assets sufficient to bail them out after the pandemic. They don’t have friends or families or others who can help them make these payments. The evidence is clear that many of them will have to default, their financial situation will be even worse because once you default, the hardship on you is exponentially greater. You can’t get credit, you’re going to pay higher prices for things. They are going to continue to suffer from this pandemic in a way that the general population doesn’t.

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And what you’re saying is, now we’re going to give judges the right to decide how much aid to give them….

— Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in remarks made during oral arguments before the Supreme Court on two cases challenging the legality President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. While conservative justices seem poised to toss the debt relief plan under the major questions doctrine, Sotomayor noted that if the Court were to do so, it would be like “changing Congress’s words because we don’t think we like what’s happening.”

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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Courts, Oral Argument, Quote of the Day, Sonia Sotomayor, Student Loan Forgiveness, Student Loans, Supreme Court