Sotomayor takes vocal role on her first day

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Sotomayor takes vocal role on her first day
The newest Supreme Court justice doesn't play the shy rookie, but peppers lawyers with questions, more even than Scalia and Ginsburg. The court takes a close look at the Miranda rule.

David G. Savage - October 6, 2009 - Reporting from Washington

By mid-morning on the first day of the Supreme Court's term, it was clear new Justice Sonia Sotomayor would fit right in -- and in particular with her talkative fellow New Yorkers.

Sotomayor peppered the lawyers with questions in a pair of cases, joining with Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the oral arguments. Together, they left the other justices sitting in silence for much of the time.

Three New Yorkers? Wonder if the other justices knew what hit them?

In the first hour alone, Sotomayor asked 36 questions, and Scalia followed with 30. Ginsburg is particularly interested in legal procedures, and she and Sotomayor dominated the questioning for much of the second hour.

Go, ladies. Girls? Women? Well, go.

In the past, some rookie justices listened for days before joining in the fast-paced arguments. Justice David H. Souter, the reserved New Hampshire native whom Sotomayor replaced, said little during his first year. Justice Clarence Thomas has not asked a question for more than three years.

If anyone assumed Sotomayor would play the role of shy rookie, she dispelled that idea within the first minutes of the opening argument. She leaned forward and began questioning Maryland Atty. Gen. Douglas Gansler about the Miranda rule, which requires police to warn a suspect that he has a right to remain silent and a right to lawyer. If a suspect says he wants a lawyer before he answers questions, the police must stop the questioning. It also bars police from trying again a day or two later to persuade him to talk without a lawyer.

But how long does this prohibition on questioning last? A police investigator in Maryland decided to visit an inmate who was held on other charges and ask him about an unresolved child abuse case. It was two years and seven months after the prisoner, Michael Shatzer, had refused to talk unless he had a lawyer. Shatzer made incriminating comments to the new investigator. After Shatzer was convicted of child abuse, a Maryland appeals court ruled that his rights were violated when he was questioned without a lawyer present.

The Supreme Court took up Maryland's appeal, and the justices, Sotomayor included, sounded as if they were searching for a new rule that would allow questioning of crime suspects after a long lapse of time.

Empathy? Wonder if conservatives know about this line of questioining, and what they think?

A lawyer for the convicted child abuser insisted he should not have been questioned once he had said he would not talk without a lawyer.

"So there is no termination point? Really?" asked Sotomayor, sounding as skeptical as Scalia.

As skeptical as Scalia.

The possibility of a rivalry between Scalia and Sotomayor has been the topic of speculation since her appointment. Scalia has been the court's most outspoken conservative for more than 20 years, and Sotomayor had shown herself to be strong and assertive as a judge on the U.S. appeals court in Manhattan.

Outside the courtroom, she has already managed to upstage Scalia. A lifelong Yankees fan, she was invited to throw out the first ball in a recent game at Yankee Stadium. Scalia, another lifelong Yankees fan, is awaiting his invitation.

The term's opening is also the day for the court to turn down litigants. The justices released a list of more than 1,800 appeals that they turned down without comment. In an abortion-related case, the court turned down a pro-adoption group called Choose Life Illinois that said it had a free-speech right to have "Choose Life" license plates. The state refused and said it did not want to get involved in the abortion controversy. (Choose Life vs. White)

The court rejected an appeal from a Florida youth who said he had a right to sit silently during the Pledge of Allegiance at school. Florida law says students can be excused from this ritual only with the parents' permission. (Frazier vs. Smith)

The court turned away a free-speech appeal from high school students in Tennessee who said they had a right to wear T-shirts displaying a Confederate flag. (Barr vs. LaFron)

The court refused a request from the Catholic archdiocese in Bridgeport, Conn., seeking to block the release of files on priests accused of sexual abuse. A state court had ordered the release, and the church argued, unsuccessfully, that this would violate its rights under the 1st Amendment. (Roman Catholic Diocesan Corp. vs. New York Times)

Justice Sotomayor is making the rounds, it seems. First, dancing; then, baseball.

The annual gala of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts is known for drawing the stars -- but a D.C. luminary outshone the Hollywood kind Tuesday night. Justice Sonia Sotomayor would have been the belle of the ball even if she had never left her table, so the room exploded when actor Esai Morales pulled the Supreme Court's first Latino member onto the dance floor for an impressively confident salsa. (More story here; meanwhile you can see more video coverage of the Noche Musical gala at Washington Life's site.)

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dancing the mambo with Esai Morales from Washington Life Magazine on Vimeo.

September 26, 2009, 6:05 pm
Justice Sotomayor Throws Out First Pitch
By Jack Curry
The New York Yankees

Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic to be named a Supreme Court justice, performed in a much different capacity at Yankee Stadium on Saturday. Sotomayor was a smiling Yankees fan who got to toss out the first pitch before the Yankees played the Boston Red Sox.
Sonia SotomayorJared Wickerham/Getty Images Sonia Sotomayor, a die-hard Yankees fan, threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium on Saturday.


After Jorge Posada escorted Sotomayor to a spot about 15 feet in front of the mound, Sotomayor, who was wearing a Yankees jersey, paused and took a deep breath. She then flipped the ball to catcher Jose Molina, who was crouching in front of the plate.

Sotomayor, a native of the Bronx, was briefly considered to throw out the first pitch at the Stadium 14 years ago. In 1995, Sotomayor, who was a federal district court judge in Manhattan at the time, issued a temporary injunction to end the baseball strike. When play resumed, the Yankees thought about inviting Sotomayor to throw out the first pitch. But the idea was tabled after Sotomayor suggested it would be inappropriate.

A human creature?

In her maiden Supreme Court appearance last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a provocative comment that probed the foundations of corporate law. During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have. Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

This should be interesting: this is an issue that conservatives, especially, though not exclusively, feel very strongly about.

After a confirmation process that revealed little of her legal philosophy, the remark offered an early hint of the direction Justice Sotomayor might want to take the court.

Confirmation hearings revel nothing of substance about a nominee, other than her or his ability to dance around a question without answering it (and the efficacy of the coaching afforded the nominated by the nominating). In an article in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Ronald Dworkin writes precisely about this topic.

It may be too late to save any future Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominations from farce, as the Judge Sonia Sotomayor hearings quickly became. Her hearings could ... have been a particularly valuable opportunity to explain the complexity of constitutional issues to the public and thus improve public understanding of this crucially important aspect of our government. But she destroyed any possibility of that benefit in her opening statement when she proclaimed, and repeated at every opportunity throughout the hearings, that her constitutional philosophy is very simple: fidelity to the law. That empty statement perpetuated the silly and democratically harmful fiction that a judge can interpret the key abstract clauses of the United States Constitution without making controversial judgments of political morality in the light of his or her own political principles. Fidelity to law, as such, cannot be a constitutional philosophy because a judge needs a constitutional philosophy to decide what the law is.

In order to get confirmed with as little controversy and nose as possible, nominees say next to nothing of substance, if that much. Roberts did it, Alito did it, and so did Sotomayor.

"Progressives who think that corporations already have an unduly large influence on policy in the United States have to feel reassured that this was one of [her] first questions," said Douglas Kendall, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center. [The organization has what might be called a determined, or presumptuous, mission: Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) is a think tank, law firm, and action center dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of our Constitution’s text and history. Its URL is equally so: http://www.theusconstitution.org]

Progressive is the term now dear to those who are otherwise known as liberals,

"I don't want to draw too much from one comment," says Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. But it "doesn't give me a lot of confidence that she respects the corporate form and the type of rights that it should be afforded."

He doesn't want to infer too much, but asserts that she's wrong.

Her long judicial and extrajudicial record suggests that she is markedly less driven by ideology and more respectful of technical legal argument than Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito seemed before their nominations and have shown themselves to be once on the Court. [Dworkin]

Associate Justice Sotomayor

Judge Sonia Sotomayor takes the Supreme Court Judicial Oath from Chief Justice John Roberts as her mother Celina Sotomayor and her brother Juan Luis Sotomayor look on in the East Conference Room in Washington, Saturday.

The Sotomayor Mambo

PROUD DAY Nancy de los Santos, left, and Azucena Maldonado.








THE SOTOMAYOR MAMBO Choco G. Meza, right, leads a celebration












Sharitza Lopez, a volunteer for Latino Justice Youth Civic Engagement Network, with her son Joel J. Santana.








August 9, 2009
Sotomayor Fans Claim the Phrase ‘Wise Latina’
By MIREYA NAVARRO

THE phrase by itself was a compliment.

Then it became a term of derision for some political commentators, bloggers and senators.

And now, “Wise Latina” is a catchphrase emblazoned on T-shirts, mugs and baby bibs, and a moniker for any number of new Facebook groups.

The author, Sonia Sotomayor, who on Thursday was confirmed as the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, may have distanced herself from the term at her confirmation hearings, but other Latinas are running with it, adopting it as a rallying cry and wearing it as a badge of pride.

Leticia Van de Putte, a Democratic state senator from San Antonio, said she had T-shirts made, reading “Another wise Latina woman,” as soon as she heard the controversial term. She sent them to nearly 200 relatives, friends and fellow politicians with a card that said: “The Hon. Sonia Sotomayor has broken ‘the glass ceiling’ for all Latinas.”

As a Mexican-American, Senator Van de Putte said, “wise Latina” conjured images of the grandmothers and elder women who were sought for advice and comfort “in our matriarchal culture.”

One of Senator Van de Putte’s T-shirt recipients was Ellen Riojas Clark, a professor of bicultural and bilingual studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio who helped create a “Wise Latina Educators” group on Facebook. Professor Riojas Clark said the members wanted to exchange information about how to inspire young Latinos to pursue degrees and careers.

John H. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research who is a linguist and a frequent commentator about race, said words or phrases often become part of a group’s vernacular when they enable people to assert themselves, reclaim a slur or redress an offense, as in the ownership of the word “bitch” among educated women or “thug” among young African-Americans.

“One thing that helps something catch on is the perception of an enemy outside,” he said. “It’s pride, but pride born in opposition.”

“ ‘Wise Latina’ is not just sticking your chin up,” he added. “It’s a fist in the air.”

But it remains to be seen whether the phrase galvanizes a movement or just becomes a memorable quotation.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, said words that catch on usually give voice to a sentiment that’s already brewing in the culture — such as the “Black is beautiful” slogan that celebrates black people’s natural features.

“ ‘Wise Latina’ crystallizes that sense of how Latinas see themselves or want to be seen,” he said.

But such phrases have limited power to spur change, he noted, although Republicans may want “wise Latina” quickly forgotten if it reminds voters of criticism by some senators that was deemed unfair.

“It’s connected to the question of whether this is going to cost Latino votes,” he said.

The phrase was the sound bite from a longer quote — “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” — that drew ridicule from opponents of her nomination.

But if the term was portrayed by some Republican senators as biased, if not outright racist, and mocked by conservative radio talk show hosts, many Latinas said the phrase felt like a reaffirmation of their own lives.

“I related greatly to it because you have to be really wise to wake up in the morning and go to school and work and come home and not get involved in the negative things in your neighborhood,” said Sharitza Lopez, 24, a junior at City College who works as a legal assistant in a law firm and is raising a 2-year-old son in the Bronx, where Justice Sotomayor grew up.

T-shirts are among the first spontaneous manifestations of the appeal of “Wise Latina” and were ubiquitous at watch-the-vote gatherings on Thursday, organized by Latinas at bars and homes around the country. In New York City, Latino groups like LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the civil rights organization on whose board Justice Sotomayor once served, are selling them as a fund-raising tool.

On the Internet, “wise Latina” blogs and Facebook groups are abuzz. “Viva Sotomayor and all of the other Wise Latinas out there!! (I’m patting myself on the back right now)” read a wall post from one of 480 members on the “I Am a Wise Latina” Facebook group, created by Elisa Palacios, a 26-year-old student at Brandeis University.

Senator Van de Putte of Texas said the only bad reaction she’s gotten over her “wise Latina” T-shirt came from a man at her sports club in San Antonio, who angrily yelled that he was also wise. “I said, ‘Great! Get a T-shirt!’ ”

In Los Angeles, Azucena Maldonado, founder of the Latina Golf Association, which promotes the sport among Latinas, and Nancy de los Santos, a Hollywood writer and producer, are busy concocting variations on the phrase — “All this ... and a wise Latina too” is the latest — after starting an online business that has sold about 150 wise-Latina themed T-shirts since mid-July.

But the two friends said making money was secondary to the main objective of reaching out to other Latinas. They said they are in the planning stages of a salon-type Latina group, to be named “The Wise Latina Society,” to engage in intellectual discussion on politics, health and other issues and promote community involvement.

Ms. de los Santos, whose producing credits include the film “Selena” and a documentary on Latino images in Hollywood that aired on HBO, said that Latinas have historically been portrayed in films and television as “hot tamales,” always “the sexy Latina ready to drop her clothes.”

“It was never anyone who was realistic,” she said.

But “wise Latina,” she said, further erodes any negative images in one powerful swoop.

“I applaud her for giving us these two words,” Ms. de los Santos said of the newest member of the United States Supreme Court. “Here’s one stereotype we can embrace.”

SCOTUS

Judge Sonia Sotomayor was greeted in her West Village neighborhood on Thursday after the Senate confirmed her nomination.






Now comes the hard part.

With the Senate’s approval of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court on Thursday, the new justice will soon take on one of the most demanding jobs in the land.

Just over a month from now, Justice Sotomayor will hear her first case, one that may transform how elections are financed, at a special summer session of the court. A few weeks later, she will join her eight new colleagues to decide which of the hundreds of appeals that have piled up over the summer the court should hear.

The volume and difficulty of the work, and the task of fitting into a storied institution populated by strong and idiosyncratic personalities, has unnerved even judges with distinguished records on lower courts, fancy credentials and ample self-confidence.

The new justice’s presence will unsettle and reshuffle the court, sometimes literally. When she takes the seat reserved for the junior justice — the one on the spectators’ far right side — four other justices will move to new places on the bench. When there is a knock at the door during the justices’ private conferences, it will be Justice Sotomayor’s job to answer it.

In addition to the blockbuster election-law case, the new term is frontloaded with important First Amendment, business, criminal and patent cases. Justice Sotomayor’s early votes and opinions, along with alliances she forges, will provide answers to at least some of the questions she avoided in confirmation hearings.

Sotomayor’s Success Stirs Pride

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s success is a watershed event for Puerto Rican New York. “This is the real Jenny from the block,” said Orlando Plaza, pictured in Spanish Harlem.





"We feel pride that someone from a background like ours achieved something so enormous," said Orlando Plaza, the co-owner of Camaradas el Barrio, a bar and restaurant in Spanish Harlem.


In the summer of 1959, Edwin Torres landed a $60-a-week job and wound up on the front page of El Diario. He had just been hired as the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York — and probably, he thinks, the entire United States. He still recalls the headline: “Exemplary Son of El Barrio Becomes Prosecutor.”

“You would’ve thought I had been named attorney general,” he said. “That’s how big it was.”

Half a century later, the long and sometimes bittersweet history of Puerto Ricans in New York is expected to add a celebratory chapter today as the Senate confirms Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Her personal journey — from a single-parent home in the South Bronx projects to the Ivy League and an impressive legal career — has provoked a fierce pride in many other Puerto Ricans who glimpse reflections of their own struggles.

Right-wing Republicans are taking their last shots at her, partly to secure their political base, partly to try and define future nomination fights, partly as pay back for Democrats shooting down Republican nominees.

“This is about the acceptance that eluded us,” said Mr. Torres, 78, who himself earned distinction as a jurist, novelist and raconteur. “It is beyond anybody’s imagination when I started that a Puerto Rican could ascend to that position, to the Supreme Court.”

Arguably the highest rung that any Puerto Rican has reached in this country, the appointment of Judge Sotomayor is a watershed event for Puerto Rican New York. It builds on the achievements that others of her generation have made in business, politics, the arts and pop culture. It extends the legacy of an earlier, lesser-known generation who created social service and educational institutions that persist today, helping newcomers from Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

It is quite interesting that Puerto Ricans set up a social safety net that helped waves of future migrants.

Yet the city has also been a place of heartbreak. Though Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship in 1917 and large numbers of them arrived in New York in the 1950s, poverty and lack of opportunity still pockmark some of their neighborhoods. A 2004 report by a Hispanic advocacy group showed that compared with other Latino groups nationwide, Puerto Ricans had the highest poverty rate, the lowest average family income and the highest unemployment rate for men.

Baffling.

In politics, the trailblazer Herman Badillo saw his career go from a series of heady firsts in the 1960s to frustration in the 1980s when his dreams of becoming the city’s first Puerto Rican mayor were foiled by Harlem’s political bosses. Just four years ago, Fernando Ferrer was trounced in his bid against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Badillo foiled by Harlem bosses; back then relations between blacks and Puerto Ricans were quite tense. Ferrer just wasn't a very convincing candidate.

That history is in danger of disappearing in East Harlem, long the cradle of Puerto Rican New York. After waves of gentrification and development, parts of the area are now being advertised as Upper Yorkville, a new annex to the predominantly white Upper East Side. While the poor have stayed behind, many of East Harlem’s successful sons and daughters have scattered to the suburbs.

Upper Yorkville? What nonsense.

“She really came at a moment when there is a public reassessment of the value of identity politics through this brouhaha in the Senate,” said Ms. Davila, a professor of anthropology at New York University who has written extensively on Puerto Rican and Latino identity. “Here came this woman who reinvigorated us with the idea that a Latina can have a lot to contribute, not just to their own group, but to the entire American society.”

But it is among her own — in the South Bronx, East Harlem or the Los Sures neighborhood of Brooklyn — where Judge Sotomayor’s success resonates loudest, for the simple reason that many people understand the level of perseverance she needed to achieve it.

Just one more

Yes, pictures are needed, but this is absurd.

Testimony Avoids Advocating

In the cat-and-mouse dance that is the kabuki of Supreme Court nomination hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor is the latest principal to toe around answering questions directly.

Now that Judge Sonia Sotomayor has completed the bulk of her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, partisans on both sides agree on one thing: The nominee has stayed away from forcefully advocating liberal positions.

Advocating anything is dangerous, an invitation to the antagonists of the nominating president and the nominee to slam the president's policies and politics, to blur and distort the answers of the nominee in order to promote the questioning Senator's agenda and politics, and, thus, makes the process a sham.

What they make of that, of course, is different. Some left-leaning scholars wish she had offered more justification for liberal interpretations of the law, while conservatives think she's being less than honest about her true beliefs.

Depends how you look at things.

A window into Judge’s acumen

Supreme Court confirmation hearings seek, in theory at least, to determine what sort of justice the nominee would be. But in practice they show something else: what sort of lawyer the nominee is.

In large part, hearings are showcases for the egos of United States Senators. Sessions tried to be a kind yet tough inquisitor who would reveal Judge Sotomayor's underlying liberalism; Graham tried to show how considerate and wise he could be; Kyl tried to show how good a lawyer he is.

“I’m a pretty good litigator,” Judge Sonia Sotomayor said on Tuesday, before reminding herself that she left that role behind 17 years ago when she joined the federal bench. “Or I was,” she said, “a really good litigator.”

She was suggesting that she might be able to persuade the other justices, should she be confirmed, to think about allowing cameras into the Supreme Court. But she might as well have been describing her own role on Tuesday, arguing the most important case of her life before a panel of senators prepared to judge her fitness for appointment to the nation’s highest court.

What I saw, in snippets from PBS News and an extended look at CSPAN coverage (commercial news networks don't show any more than snippets seconds long, which are nearly worthless and can be quite misleading), was an intelligent nominee who smiled and show deference as needed, refused to get bogged down in detail, and did quite well.

She was questioned most closely on her rulings concerning the Second Amendment and race discrimination. Judge Sotomayor used a litigator’s skills in presenting her responses.

She first established that she was in complete command of the facts, reciting them in detail and length. Then she argued that her rulings were required by settled precedents. She sometimes pointed to later decisions from other appeals courts that had arrived at the same conclusion. But she avoided addressing points that might have opened a wider discussion of the wisdom of her rulings.

Sotomayor confirmation hearings start Monday

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings start Monday.


Since Judge Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court, a number of things have happened: Iranian elections and their aftermath; Governor Sanford's meltdown and his Buenos Aires trips; Al Franken declared a Senator; Michael Jackson's death and the following media circus; Governor Palin going fishing.



More than two decades ago, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee as a nominee for a district court judgeship in Alabama and was rejected by the panel over charges of racial insensitivity.

Some name: Jefferson, one presumes, after Jeff Davis (himself accorded the third President's surname), and Beauregard after PGT Beauregard.

Next week, Senator Jeff Sessions, as he is now known, will play a major role as the ranking Republican on the same committee as it considers the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. And one of the themes of the confirmation hearings, with Mr. Sessions now on the other side of the process, will be racial and ethnic preferences.

Racial insensitivity, two decades ago? 1980s? Reagan.

The 12 Democrats on the committee include Senator Al Franken of Minnesota, who was sworn into office on Tuesday. He is not a lawyer — all but 5 of the committee’s 19 members are — but in his previous life as a comedian he once played Senator Paul Simon, Democrat of Illinois, in a “Saturday Night Live” skit about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991.

Well, that should be enough to inform Franken, no?

Mr. Sessions brings to his role a background that sounds as if it were concocted for a television drama: after his 1986 humiliation, he left his post as a federal prosecutor, entered elective politics and succeeded Senator Howell Heflin, the venerable Alabama Democrat whose opposition to his nomination proved crucial. At the time, Mr. Sessions was depicted before the committee as a throwback to the Jim Crow South because of some purported racially insensitive remarks and his decision to prosecute three black voting-rights advocates who were acquitted at trial.

Mr. Sessions, who heatedly disputed any implication of racism, has insisted in interviews that he carries no grudge from those days and has said that, if anything, his experience has given him empathy with nominees.

Empathy? Interesting word; the President used it. Should be good theatre.

Decision Reflects Court's Deep Division

Sonia Sotomayor, the New York appellate judge President Barack Obama has nominated to the Supreme Court, has credited her success in part to postwar America's efforts to correct centuries of racial discrimination.

If, as expected, her nomination is confirmed, the self-described "affirmative-action baby" will join a court divided on that very topic.

Chief Justice John Roberts came to the court with a deep-seated skepticism of race-conscious policies. In a number of cases his court has ruled, often 5-4, in favor of limiting the scope of civil-rights laws and practices devised to address racial discrimination.

"It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race," Justice Roberts wrote in a 2006 concurring opinion rejecting a Voting Rights Act challenge to Texas' congressional redistricting.

No more sordid than racism.

"This is an area where there are sharply divergent intuitions about the role of race in American society, and sharply divergent views about what should be done about it," says Goodwin Liu, co-director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at the University of California, Berkeley.

Will she, as expected and predicted by so many pundits, be predictably liberal?

It also is possible that she could seek to hammer out a middle ground. Still, sometimes justices' views change, if subtly, over time. The chief justice himself has displayed a more moderate streak this term. Earlier this month, he wrote an opinion joined by seven other justices that left alive a bedrock provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Roberts moderating? What an interesting comment.

The Supreme Court's decision Monday in the New Haven firefighters' case highlights the justices' split. The four liberals would have upheld the city's decision to toss out test results that it worried were discriminatory. Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion.


A concurring opinion from Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, effectively accused New Haven's leadership of pandering to a local black political leader in throwing out the test results. Notably, Chief Justice Roberts didn't join that toughly worded opinion.

Well, it is all relative.

’98 Sotomayor hints on Death Penalty

Judge Sonia Sotomayor in 1998. That year she handled a death penalty matter, her only such case on the federal bench.













As a drug kingpin and his bodyguard, both black, faced the first death penalty trial in Manhattan since the days of the Rosenbergs, their lawyers argued that the practice of capital punishment was racist.

“We’re doing what the death penalty has always done historically, which is target minority people,” one of the lawyers said in 1998 as he asked a Federal District Court judge to declare the penalty unconstitutional.

That judge was Sonia Sotomayor — a Bronx-born woman of Puerto Rican descent who as a young lawyer had leveled much the same attack on capital punishment. And as she listened to the arguments that day, she acknowledged there were many unresolved “tensions” surrounding the death penalty. But she flatly told the lawyers she had no power to resolve them. “I don’t as a judge,” she said. “They are not up to me. Ultimately, they are up to Congress and the Supreme Court.”

And now Judge Sotomayor has been nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court.

News today

In Iran Race, Ex-Leader Works to Oust President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has helped define the race by his feud with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Is Given More Leeway Gen. Stanley McChrystal has a wide berth to pick a dream team of subordinates as he moves to carry out a new strategy for combating the Taliban

Doctors’ Group Opposes Public Insurance Plan Opposition by the American Medical Association could be a hurdle for advocates of a government-sponsored insurance plan.

A Paris Plan, Less Grand Than Gritty France’s president has scaled back his ambition to redesign Paris, but still plans to improve the city’s transportation and housing stock.

Videos Reveal Sotomayor’s Positions on Affirmative Action and Other Issues

U.S. Saw Problems on the Way at Merrill
E-mails from the Federal Reserve indicate Bank of America’s executives were pressed to stay quiet about Merrill Lynch’s financial condition, a document written by House Republicans claims.

U.S. Pushes a Troubled Citigroup to Heal Itself
As other banks prepare to exit the bailout program, the government is tightening its grip on Citigroup, calling for change at the bank.

Fiat Deal With Chrysler Seals Swift 42-Day Overhaul
The speed with which the automaker’s restructuring plan swept through the court system was seen as an important victory for the Obama administration.

An Ivy-Covered Path

If confirmed, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who attended Princeton University and Yale Law School, would sit alongside seven other Ivy League graduates on the court. Only Justice John Paul Stevens provides a measure of non-Ivy diversity, having graduated from the University of Chicago and the Northwestern University School of Law.

9 lawyers.

In the history of the court, half of the 110 justices were undergraduates, graduate students or law students in the Ivy League; since 1950, the percentage is 70. From the beginning of the 20th century, every president who has seated a justice has picked at least one Ivy graduate.

A rising elitism.

“There is both a funneling and homogenizing effect from these schools,” said G. William Domhoff, a professor of psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of “Who Rules America?”

Lack of diversity.

The effect, Professor Domhoff said, “plays out in terms of social networks, cultural/social capital, and a feeling of being part of the in-group.” It is one of subtle conditioning — what Sam Rayburn, the former House speaker, meant when he famously said, “If you want to get along, go along.”

Don't step over the defined limits.

Even those who might not agree with Professor Domhoff’s political critique would like to see more educational variety on the Supreme Court. Limiting the universe of nominees largely to Ivy League graduates “is not good for the court or the country,” said Linda L. Addison, the partner in charge of the New York office of Fulbright & Jaworski. “Educational diversity would strengthen the court, as have racial, ethnic, gender and religious diversity.”

J. William Fulbright was a senator from Arkansas; Leon Jaworski had quite a portfolio, including being special prosecutor during the Watergate investigations.

The lack of a top-tier law degree can become a basis for attacking a nominee. When President George W. Bush nominated Harriet E. Miers to succeed Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, one of the points hammered by her conservative opponents was that she had attended the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University.

Conservatives wanted a more ideologically correct candidate, and recognized she was a lightweight.

Defenders of such appointments say the notion of a homogenous set of graduates from elite universities is an overblown myth. William G. Bowen, a former president of Princeton, said the cookie-cutter accusation missed the role of a student’s character.

Good point.

“They come out as very different human beings, even though they came through a similar process,” Mr. Bowen said. “What you hope these people have in common is discipline, and the ability to lead from assumptions to analysis to conclusions. But that is not to say that they’re going to use the same analysis, or come to the same conclusions.”

But then he contradicts it. If they use the same methodology and reach the same results, there is no diversity of thought.

Edward B. Fiske, who publishes a leading college guide, pointed out that although John Kerry and George W. Bush attended Yale at about the same time, “you’d never know they went to the same school.” And while Judge Sotomayor graduated from the same law school as Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., they appear to occupy different parts of the political spectrum.

Very good point.

Calvin Trillin, a journalist and author who has written about his experiences as a Midwesterner attending Yale in the 1950s, said, “I’m not bothered by the fact that nine out of nine, or six out of nine, went to Ivy League law schools,” because the institutions have grown more diverse. “These places have become, themselves, much more like the country,” Mr. Trillin said.

The court’s ties to elite institutions go back through the nation’s history, Professor Epstein said. Among the first on the court were John Jay (King’s College, the future Columbia) and William Cushing (Harvard). Of the nation’s 110 justices, 18 went to Harvard Law, 8 to Yale Law, and 6 to Columbia. (The largest plurality of justices over all, 44, attended no law school, since one could practice law in early days without a degree.)

Couldn't do that today.

Some justices proudly perpetuate the idea that the right school is an essential credential. In April, after a talk at the American University Washington College of Law, Justice Antonin Scalia (Georgetown and Harvard Law) told a student how he chose his clerks: “From the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest.”

He is something else.

Sotomayor Details Finances, Key Cases

Nine days after her nomination, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge sent the Senate Judiciary Committee a 172-page response to a committee questionnaire, along with a 129-page appendix, detailing her education and employment history, her legal work and judicial opinions, her financial worth and the Supreme Court selection process.

Asked to name the 10 most significant cases over which she presided, Judge Sotomayor chose high-profile sports issues and tough-on-crime decisions. The first case she chose was her 1995 preliminary injunction that ended the Major League Baseball strike. No. 2 was her rejection of a lower-court ruling allowing Ohio State University running back Maurice Clarett to buck the National Football League's age restriction and enter the draft early.

She also highlighted her views on freedom of speech. In one case, she struck down a gag order on the press covering the prosecution of Frank Quattrone of Credit Suisse First Boston, saying the quest for an orderly trial did not outweigh the First Amendment. In another, she ruled against a paroled child sex offender who said he should be allowed to possess pornographic material.

Speeches, Rulings

Read the entire speech "Where Policy Is Made" During a panel discussion at Duke Law School in 2005, Sotomayor responded to a question about clerkships by noting that "court of appeals is where policy is made."

• See a video excerpt of the remark
• Watch the entire discussion (relevant portion begins at 40 minutes)

Ricci v. DeStefano

Wash Wire: Audio Tape Reveals Views on Ricci v. DeStefano

Tilt to Right of Souter

While Judge Sonia Sotomayor stands in the liberal mainstream on many issues, her record suggests that the Supreme Court nominee could sometimes rule with the top court's conservatives on questions of criminal justice.

Maybe they are beginning to realize they rushed to judge her without knowing anything much about the Judge.

New York criminal-defense lawyers say she is surprisingly tough on crime for a Democratic-backed appointee -- a byproduct, they believe, of her tenure as a prosecutor.

Not every Democrat, not every Hispanic, not every woman is "soft" on crime, nor fits into the expected pigeonhole.

"The reputation of Sotomayor was that sentencing was not an easy ride," says Gerald Shargel, a criminal-defense attorney.

If Nest had bothered to review her record before spewing his nonsense ...

Following recent Supreme Court precedent, Judge Sotomayor tends to see relatively few grounds to overturn criminal convictions, says John Siffert, a New York attorney who taught an appellate advocacy class with the judge at New York University School of Law from 1996 to 2006. On the trial bench, he says, "she was not viewed as a pro-defense judge."

Still, there are reservations, aren't there?

To be sure, Judge Sotomayor has at times shown leniency toward criminal defendants. In 2001, after she had become an appellate-court judge, she agreed to preside over the drug-conspiracy trial of Sandra Carter. The jury convicted Ms. Carter, but Judge Sotomayor sentenced her to six months in prison, far below the term that she could have drawn under the sentencing guidelines, says Edward O'Callaghan, the prosecutor in the case.

Aha!

Judge Sotomayor, he says, took into account the fact that the defendant was a first-time offender who made far less money than other conspiracy participants.

Oh, geez: empathy.

Michael Bachner, a New York defense lawyer who has handled trials and appeals before Judge Sotomayor, senses a divide in her criminal jurisprudence. She can be "very tough" on white-collar defendants from privileged backgrounds, but is "more understanding of individuals who grew up in a tougher circumstance.

What would Newt say?

Jeffrey Fisher, a Stanford Law School professor who was on the losing side of the January Supreme Court decision, says Judge Sotomayor's ruling demonstrates a "willingness to give police the benefit of the doubt."

Republican balancing act on Court nominee

As a conservative former Texas Supreme Court justice, Mr. Cornyn might be expected to make a tough intellectual case against Judge Sotomayor. But as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he also has to worry about how the confirmation battle plays across the nation. And his own future back home is tied somewhat to Hispanics who will be closely watching the confirmation proceedings.

Conflicting calls?

Elected to a second term last fall in a difficult year for his party, Mr. Cornyn said he saw no conflict among his ideological leanings, his responsibility for boosting Republican Senate candidates and his own home-state interests.

No conflicts?

He also said he would press to define the contours of Judge Sotomayor’s legal philosophy and remind Americans that Democrats were not alone in trying to put a Hispanic jurist in line for the Supreme Court.

A true point.

"I will bet there are a lot of people who don’t really remember Miguel Estrada,” Mr. Cornyn said, referring to the Honduran-born federal appeals court nominee put forward by President George W. Bush. Mr. Estrada was considered likely to be a future Supreme Court nominee before his nomination to the appeals court was blocked by a Democratic filibuster in 2003.

Why did the Democrats block Estrada? And Republicans, and conservatives, want some payback. That is how the game is played.

“I think it speaks well of Newt,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who met with Judge Sotomayor and said he did not believe she was racist. “There is no evidence of that.”

Speaks well of Newt that he flip-flopped so quickly? Had the decency to take back an unsupported, inflammatory charge? Nice Newt.

But in a sign that Republicans will not easily fall in line on the nomination, Mr. Graham said he remained troubled by her comments and painted himself as a likely vote against her.

Chuck Todd, of MSNBC, said that if the President "sent a ham sandwich" to the Senate, it would get 25 no votes. I imagine Graham, one of President Clinton's chief pursuers, would vote against the ham sandwich.

Despite his conservative credentials, Mr. Cornyn finds himself at odds with some on the right over more than just the tone of the nomination fight. He is also under fire for the way he is carrying out his responsibilities as chairman of the Senate Republican campaign operation.

Which points to that conflict between ideological purity and political pragmatism.

His decision to back Gov. Charlie Crist over a more conservative Republican for the Senate nomination in Florida and his courting of party moderates like Representative Michael N. Castle of Delaware for a Senate run there have drawn scorn from some conservatives, who accuse him of watering down the brand.

The brand is in deep trouble, and the right wing wants ideological purity.

Mr. Cornyn makes no apologies, saying he bases political decisions on a simple premise: “I want to win, and I don’t think the Republican Party wins becoming more and more insular.”

Mr. Cornyn argues that Republicans desperately need to become more inclusive, a factor that drove him to challenge the attacks on Judge Sotomayor and helps govern his view of the nomination. He said that he was all for a close examination of the nominee, but that scrutiny must focus on her judicial philosophy, qualifications and record, not her ethnicity or sex.

“She certainly has a distinguished career,” Mr. Cornyn said. “The real question is how she views her role as a judge: whether it is to advance causes or groups or whether it is to call balls and strikes.”

Justices do not call balls and strikes, they decide whether the pitchers and batters are playing according to the rules, and decide on the rules.

Sotomayor's Talk Made No Waves in '01

Newt doesn't want her on the bench. He should read her speech (given at Berkeley Law).

Sotomayor talked about her Latina identity and how it affects her work on the bench. Today, President Obama nominated Sotomayor as his first appointment to the Supreme Court. This speech was originally published in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal in 2002.]

What Newt meant

Gingrich takes back Sotomayor 'racist' charge
Newt Gingrich is easing off his charge that Sonia Sotomayor is racist, saying it's what she said about the decisions of a "wise Latina woman" that was racist, not necessarily her.

Sotomayor scores high on Hill trip
Sonia Sotomayor launched her Supreme Court bid on Capitol Hill and began explaining - and showing - what she meant about being a "wise" Latina. The tour came as Republican leaders insisted right-wing pundits don't speak for them.