Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor says she sometimes finds the panel's rulings so upsetting that they drive her to tears.

"There are days that I've come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried," she said in remarks at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she received an award Friday.

"There have been those days. And there are likely to be more," she added sadly.

Earlier this year the justice said in an address at the University of California at Berkely School of Law that "every loss truly traumatizes me in my stomach and in my heart."

But "I have to get up the next morning and keep on fighting," she said.

At Harvard she reiterated: "There are moments when I'm deeply, deeply sad. And there are moments when ... I feel desperation. We all do."

But "you have to own it," she added. "You have to accept it. You have to shed the tears, and then you have to wipe them and get up and fight some more."

Sotomayor didn't name the rulings that reduce her to tears.

On Friday fellow Justice Clarence Thomas slammed the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that launched the integration of schools in America. The top court had ruled that segregated schools violated the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution.

Thomas called the decision an "extravagant use of judicial power."