In his widely-read “In The Loop” political insider gossip column in today’s Washington Post, Al Kamen notes that Sonia Sotomayor,
with more than six years of district court and more than 10 years of appeals court experience, goes before the committee with more years of total experience in the federal courts than any Supreme Court justice since . . .?
Ah, you guessed it: since the legendary Justice Horace Harmon Lurton, who served for 17 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit before going to the high court in 1910. Lurton, a former Confederate soldier whose photos remind some of White House counselor David Axelrod, served only four years before he died, so he didn’t leave a substantial jurisprudential footprint.
Given the breadth and depth of Sotomayor’s judicial experience, and the numerous opinions she has written or joined, I think it is in order for me to repeat the invitation I extended to her in my recent post, Is Sonia Sotomayor “A Wise Latina”?, an invitation that I will now offer to all of her supporters as well:
Why not simply ask Judge Sotomayor to point to her own opinions from her many years on the bench that are “better” because of her Latina physiological or cultural inheritance? Far from regarding such a question as out of order, she has virtually invited it. In The Speech (and subsequent law review article that printed it), after all, she herself said:
I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.
Fine. So Sotomayor should show us where those differences have actually led her to make better decisions than a white male could make.
If she can’t point to examples from her own voluminous opinions that, because of her own Latina “richness of experience,” are “better” than those that could be written by “a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she should apologize to all the white male judges with whom she has served, and the rest of us as well.
