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President Obama has nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court.
If confirmed by the Democratic-controlled Senate, Judge Sotomayor, 54, would replace Justice David H. Souter to become the second woman on the court and only the third female justice in the history of the Supreme Court. She also would be the first Hispanic justice to serve on the Supreme Court.
Conservative groups reacted with sharp criticism on Tuesday morning. “Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written,” said Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network…
Judge Sotomayor has sat for the last 11 years on the federal appeals bench in Manhattan. As the top federal appeals court in the nation’s commercial center, the court is known in particular for its expertise in corporate and securities law. For six years before that, she was a federal district judge in New York…
Born in the Bronx on June 23, 1954, she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 8. Her father, a factory worker, died a year later. Her mother, a nurse at a methadone clinic, raised her daughter and a younger son on a modest salary.
Judge Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976 and and attended Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She spent five years as a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office before entering private practice.
But she longed to return to public service, she said, inspired by the “Perry Mason” series she watched as a child. In 1992, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended the politically centrist lawyer to President George H. W. Bush.
It’s not out of line that a traditional conservative Republican appointed her. Her life is a Horatio Alger story – the sort that inspired generations of Americans to aspire for a better life.
Previously approved by two bi-partisan efforts in Congress, no doubt the Party of “NO” will waste a couple of months on preaching their ideology, trying to stop her appointment to the bench.
Eugene Volokh, Professor, UCLA Law School:
“Wise Latina” speech: troubling
A judge’s life experiences doubtless affect the discretionary decisions she makes – decisions about sentencing, witness credibility, common law development, interpretation of ambiguous historical sources, and other areas where the law or the facts do not point to one clear decision. Her race, religion, sex, and the like will doubtless have some effect on such discretionary decisions as well, though of course judges should try to be as impartial as possible. So Judge Sotomayor is factually correct in acknowledging this reality, though I think judges ought to try to set such group identities aside as much as they can while judging.
Yet the statement that one’s ethnicity and sex make one a better judge than someone of another ethnicity and sex – “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” – is troubling. To be sure, if she was just saying that the average “wise” person (of any sex or ethnicity) with “rich … experiences” reaches better conclusions than the average person who may or may not have wisdom or rich experience, that statement is tautologically true. But it’s hard to see how that would be so, especially since she was expressly comparing wise Latina women with white men.
Rather, the statement – read in context – appears to be that Latina womanhood gives people something of an edge when it comes to wisdom, richness of experience, and decisionmaking over white men. That strikes me as factually implausible; white men strike me as no less likely to have wisdom or rich experience as Latino women, even if on balance they may on average have slightly different kinds of experience. And it strikes me as very much the wrong attitude for a judge to take, and to publicly express. Perhaps this was just inartful wording, and Judge Sotomayor meant to say something else; and of course this is just one sentence out of a long legal and judicial career. Still, I think the sentiments that the statement on its face expresses are not the sorts of sentiments that we would like our Supreme Court Justices to have, whether those sentiments would refer to the allegedly greater wisdom of Latino women or white men.