June 2, 2009
Judge Sonia Sotomayor said in a 1996 speech at Princeton University's Third World Center (now called the Carl A. Fields Center) that when she arrived at Princeton in 1972 as her high school's valedictorian, "I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a...
June 1, 2009
The concerns that I and others have raised about Judge Sonia Sotomayor's now famous "wise Latina woman" speech, and about her vote last year to uphold race-based discrimination in promotions among New Haven firefighters, raise this question:
Has Sotomayor exhibited a pattern of favoritism to minorities in race-related cases during her more than 10 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for...
May 28, 2009
As has occurred with dispiriting regularity in recent decades, the current debate over filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court has been marred -- already! -- by a considerable dose of demagogy and false factual claims. It would be nice to see the media truth-squadding such stuff, without the usual double standards.
Take, for example, the wildly overheated denunciations of Judge Sonia Sotomayor by...
May 26, 2009
I have given some reasons (noted below) why Sonia Sotomayor might be an especially controversial pick with conservatives and some centrists -- not to mention yours truly.
So what political calculation might underlie President Obama's decision to nominate her anyway, despite his various suggestions that he would like to make a consensus pick?
It's possible that Obama was simply wowed by her up-...
May 26, 2009
Stuart Taylor Jr. sits down with TheAtlantic.com's Bob Cohn for a conversation in reaction to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. Read a more detailed take on the political ramifications in an earlier post on The Ninth Justice.
May 22, 2009
"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn't lived that life." -- Judge Sonia Sotomayor, in her Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law in 2001
The above assertion and the rest of a...
May 15, 2009
Barack Obama first explained his "empathy" test for choosing justices in voting against the nomination of John Roberts to be chief justice in 2005:
What matters on the Supreme Court is those 5 percent of cases that are truly difficult... In those 5 percent of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal...
May 12, 2009
President Obama will not begin interviewing possible Supreme Court nominees until next week at the earliest, according to the White House. So what's going on behind the scenes?
I don't know for sure, but I can guess: Apart from vetting the leading prospects to flush out any character flaws, ethical issues or tax problems of the kind that have plagued some Obama nominees, the White House is...
May 10, 2009
Introduction
The worldwide scandal spurred by the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Afghanistan and secret CIA prisons during the Bush Administration has been a stain on America’s honor and a catastrophe for our national image. Understandably eager to save innocent lives by breaking the resistance of a few Al Qaeda leaders, Bush and his aides went way overboard. Instead...
May 9, 2009
Many hope, and many others fear, that President Obama will choose a crusading liberal activist to energize the Supreme Court's progressive wing.
Such an appointee might push to expand racial preferences, abortion rights, and especially welfare rights for poor people; to strike down the law barring openly gay people from the military; to recognize gay marriage (which Obama has opposed); to end the...
