OT: U.S. Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor
This is OT from SFF discussions, but I hope you'll forgive me the indulgence since it's one of my areas of interest.
Here are some starting points for fighting the continuing racist derail of the nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court of Judge Sonia Sotomayor:
- SCOTUSblog has more in-depth analysis than you can shake a stick at, but particularly of interest to a general audience are two posts about her judicial decisions involving race. The first discusses the derail (though it doesn't call it that) and says,
It seems to me that there is an infinitely simpler and more accurate way of figuring out whether Judge Sotomayor decides cases involving race fairly and dispassionately - read her decisions. So I did: I am in the midst of reviewing every single race-related case on which she sat on the Second Circuit.
The second post describes the results:
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.
- Slate points out why Judge Sotomayor was talking about race in the first place:
unlike their "nonethnic" counterparts, such "minority role models" are regularly asked to put on the public record-at lunches, award ceremonies, community events-lengthy statements of their views on America's most explosive topic: race.
- The New York Times discusses the very different ways race has shaped the outlooks of Judge Sotomayor and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
- ETA: General discussion of Judge Sotomayor's judicial record: A short accessible New York Times article on civil (in the non-criminal sense) and business cases, Sotomayor’s Appellate Opinions Are Unpredictable, Lawyers and Scholars Say, and a long (88 pages) PDF report from the ACLU, with helpful summary introduction and table of contents, on her civil liberties and civil rights record (including criminal law): ACLU PDF report.
- ETA 2: The research on how gender influences judging, at Slate.
- ETA 3: comprehensive list of substantive reports at SCOTUSblog.
Nb.: as my office regularly appears before both the court Judge Sotomayor currently sits on and the court she has been nominated to, I do not express any views on the merits of her nomination.