A New York Bloc on the Supreme Court

Clockwise from top left, Ruth Fremson/The New York Times; bottom left, Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times - Clockwise from top left, childhood homes of Antonin Scalia, in Queens; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in Brooklyn; Elena Kagan, in Manhattan; and Sonia Sotomayor, in the Bronx.

There will, perhaps, be little that the 4 native New Yorkers will agree on, but they do have their provenance in common. And, curiously, they are each from a different borough.


The Supreme Court has some justices who are liberals and some who are conservatives. It has some who see themselves as strict constructionists and some who probably do not. And then it has the justices who grew up riding the subway and the ones who grew up turning right on red. It has the justice who was the treasurer of the Go-Getters Club at James Madison High School in Brooklyn. It has the justice who watched “Perry Mason” on television in a housing project in the Bronx and decided that the star defense lawyer was less important than the judge. It has the justice who took part in a junior military training program at Xavier High School in Manhattan and carried his rifle home on the train to Queens. If the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is confirmed, she would join three others in a distinct bloc. For the first time in the court’s history, said William Treanor, the dean of Fordham Law School, it would have four justices who grew up in New York City.

Two Jews, an Italian and a Puerto Rican: that expresses well what New York is, and has been.

Other notable justices spent all or part of their youth in the city, including Felix Frankfurter and Benjamin N. Cardozo. But if Ms. Kagan takes the seat being vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens, a Chicagoan, it will be an unusual moment for a city whose political influence has been slowly shrinking since the nation outgrew the original 13 colonies.

It has been a long time since New York's political power declined. Political not just as in elected representatives, but governmental.

Justice Scalia grew up in Elmhurst, in what he once called “a really mishmash sort of a New York,” with Germans, Irish and Puerto Ricans. He went to Public School 13, where he got straight A’s, and Xavier, the Jesuit school in Manhattan, where he was first in his class and was in the military program.


Elmhurst is now Indian, Latino, but more Colombians that Puerto Ricans.

He said he realized that New Yorkers were assertive when his high school band went to march in a parade in Washington “These people just stood there and looked at us, you know?” he told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2008. “In New York, people say, ‘Hey, play something for us, you know? You bums, why don’t you play something?’ They were — they were alive, they were confrontational.”

So is he, assertive, and acerbic (which I think is a very common adjective used when describing his style of questioning in the Court).

Three of the four New Yorkers — Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor and Ms. Kagan, if she is confirmed — would form the court’s liberal wing with Justice Stephen G. Breyer. Professor Bonventre of Albany Law School said that the “ethnic-gender-religious composition of the liberals on the court” would underscore their differences with the conservative majority. “For most New Yorkers, they will look at the liberal minority and say, ‘That’s us, that’s our America,’ ” Professor Bonventre said, “and so when the court renders liberal decisions and you have all of those four, the three women and the Jewish guy, it will make complete sense to New Yorkers, whereas for the South and the Bible Belt, people are going to say, ‘They don’t understand the rest of America.’ ”


But Martin Flaherty, a professor at Fordham Law School who knew Ms. Kagan when they were undergraduates at Princeton, said that being a judge from New York did not mean “everyone is going to be a liberal or a conservative. “Witness Scalia,” Mr. Flaherty said. “But there’s a certain toughness, mental toughness, to spending time in New York. That is true of all four New Yorkers. None of them is a pushover.”

Cardozo: Hispanic?

Some may consider Benjamin Cardozo, shown in 1936, the first Hispanic justice.














While most people may believe Sonia Sotomayor is poised to become the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court, there has been a rich under-the-radar debate for years as to whether the court had already had a Hispanic justice.

A stretch?

Several people have suggested that Justice Benjamin Cardozo might properly hold the title of the court’s first Hispanic justice. Prof. Andrew Kaufman of the Harvard Law School, who is the author of a 1998 biography of Cardozo, said the debate was esoteric, complicated and, perhaps above all, amusing.

Silly.

“Was Cardozo Hispanic?” Professor Kaufman asked, noting that the assertion has been prevalent on Web sites and in articles for years. “Well, I think he regarded himself as a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors came from the Iberian Peninsula.”

The executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Arturo Vargas, said the contemporary political definition of Hispanic in the United States would definitely not include Cardozo. The practical definition he uses, Mr. Vargas said, includes people who are “descended from countries in the Americas” with a Spanish-language heritage. It does not even include those from Spain itself, he said.

A right-wing commentator appearing on the News Hour discussion of Judge Sotomayor yesterday asserted that Cardozo was the first Hispanic justice, clearly an attempt to defang the effect of President Obama's nomination of Judge Sotomayor.

Voices of New York

Found this on the Web: an NYU study of NYC's ethnicities.

In the Fall of 2001, the New York University Morse Academic Plan (MAP) course, The Language of America's Ethnic Minorities, undertook a project to hear the voices of real and imagined immigrant communities, and learn about the people behind them. The students of this class traveled throughout the city to seek out neighborhoods where thirty-four separate ethnic cultures were thought to be flourishing. There, they discovered the degree to which the distinct languages of groups (LOTE: Languages other than English) are being maintained or lost, and the implications for cultural distinctiveness or assimilation.

Koreans and Bangladeshis Vie in L.A.

The Los Angeles neighborhood known as Koreatown has the largest concentration of Koreans in the country (Difficult to believe it has more than Flushing)







In the last 30 years or so, a six-square-mile area west of downtown Los Angeles has become an enclave of some 50,000 Korean-Americans, the largest concentration of Koreans in the country. The district is now commonly known as Koreatown.

A 2000 study shows the Korean population of NYC: 2000 Alone or In-Combination Population in New York City 90,896 and Queens (as a Percentage of NYC Population) 63,906 (70%). Most of that number must be Flushing, and that was in 2000.

The last official count of the Bangladeshi population, in the 2000 census, showed only 1,700 in all of Los Angeles County. But the Bangladeshi consul general here, Abu Zafar, estimates that there are now 10,000 to 15,000 in Los Angeles and some 25,000 in Southern California, making the region the nation’s second-largest home to Bangladeshis, after New York City.

“This cross-ethnic tension is somewhat new,” said Jan Lin, a sociology professor at Occidental College here whose specialty is ethnic enclaves. “Historically, it’s been whites against nonwhites as new immigrants move into established white neighborhoods.”

But the tension is not surprising, Mr. Lin said, given the tendency of immigrant groups to live in close proximity to one another. In Hollywood, Thai Town is inside Little Armenia. Little Tokyo and Chinatown occupy distinct but neighboring spaces downtown. And a Salvadoran business corridor lies adjacent to Koreatown.

Same as in Queens.

“It’s nice to embrace other communities,” said Brad Lee, a member of the Koreatown neighborhood council’s board, “as long as it’s not in our backyard. Or in our front yard.”