Sotomayor's paper trail
Jun. 1st, 2009 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoMarc Ambinder, at The Atlantic, decided to get mildly snarky:
He then points to a study by Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSblog, which at that time was half-complete (50 cases). Goldstein has now posted full results, and the findings will surprise only the ideologues who thought this dog could hunt:
"Wouldn't it be great if Judge Sonia Sotomayor had a decades-long paper trail detailing, in minute detail, her views on race, affirmative action, fairness and discrimination? If we did -- if we knew how she acted on her beliefs in past, we might be able to predict how she'd act on them in the future. Right?
Well......
Turns out that race comes up fairly frequently in legal proceedings adjudicated by United States courts of appeals. Sotomayor participated in 100 such cases."
He then points to a study by Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSblog, which at that time was half-complete (50 cases). Goldstein has now posted full results, and the findings will surprise only the ideologues who thought this dog could hunt:
"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."
