Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues The Obama Administration Obama picks Sotomayor for high court

The inability, or refusal, to allow any subjective factors to enter into deliberation is guaranteed to result in unsatisfactory outcomes from a "justice" perspective.

Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent’s point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case. So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1.

Of the roughly 75 panel opinions rejecting claims of discrimination, Judge Sotomayor dissented 2 times. In Neilson v. Colgate-Palmolive Co., 199 F.3d 642 (1999), she dissented from the affirmance of the district court’s order appointing a guardian for the plaintiff, an issue unrelated to race. In Gant v. Wallingford Bd. of Educ., 195 F.3d 134 (1999), she would have allowed a black kindergartner to proceed with the claim that he was discriminated against in a school transfer. A third dissent did not relate to race discrimination: In Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143 (2002), she dissented from the majority’s holding that the NYPD could fire a white employee for distributing racist materials.
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In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She participated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims. Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking.

Tom Goldstein , "Judge Sotomayor and Race - Results from the Full Data Set", SCOTUS BLog, May 29th, 2009

Senator Coburn: Thank you. During Judge Roberts’s hearing, Senator Feinstein tried to get him to talk and speak out of his heart and I thought it was a great question so that the American people can see your heart. This booklet is designed to protect the weak, to give equality to those who might not be able to do it themselves, to protect the frail, to make sure that there is equal justice under the law. You know, I think at times during these hearings you have been unfairly criticized or characterized as that you don’t care about the less fortunate. You don’t care about the little guy. You don’t care about the weak or the innocent. Can you comment just about Sam Alito and what he cares about and let us see a little bit of your heart and what is important to you and why?

Judge Alito: Senator, I tried to-in my opening statement, I tried to provide a little picture of who I am as a human being and how my background and my experiences have shaped me and brought me to this point. I don’t come from an affluent background or a privileged background. My parents were both quite poor when they were growing up. I know about their experiences, and I didn’t experience those things. I don’t take credit for anything that they did or anything that they overcame, but I think that children learn a lot from their parents and they learn from what the parents say, but I think they learn a lot more from what the parents do and from what they take from the stories of their parents’ lives.

And that’s why I went into that in my opening statement, because when a case comes before me involving, let’s say, someone who is an immigrant, and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases, I can’t help but think of my own ancestors because it wasn’t that long ago when they were in that position. And so it’s my job to apply the law. It’s not my job to change the law or to bend the law to achieve any results, but I have to, when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, this could be your grandfather. This could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time and they were people who came to this country.

When I have cases involving children, I can’t help but think of my own children and think about my children being treated in the way the children may be treated in the case that’s before me. And that goes down the line. When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender, and I do take that into account. When I have a case involving someone who’s been subjected to discrimination because of disability, I have to think of people who I’ve known and admired very greatly who had disabilities and I’ve watched them struggle to overcome the barriers that society puts up, often just because it doesn’t think of what it’s doing, the barriers that it puts up to them.

So those are some of the experiences that have shaped me as a person.

Of course there is. But self-delude all you want. Semantics are everything aren't they?