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Now that the insulting question of whether Sonia Sotomayor is just
another Harriet Miers has subsided, a new one arises: Does Barack
Obama's nominee have more in common with conservative justice Sam
Alito? Liberals opposed Alito far more strenuously than they did
current Chief Justice and George W. Bush nominee John Roberts. An
Italian from working-class roots who also attended Princeton, Alito
wields the same, "up from the bootstraps" personal history as
Sotomayor. And—much like the Obama administration's emphasis on its
nominee's "wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life's journey"—the Bush White House stressed... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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You're right, Hanna. The White House, and Sotomayor, too, by agreeing to the walk back,
are giving the "wise Latina" mini-fracas more air, not less. Her speech
sparked an interesting and even vital discussion this week about the
value of having judges with different life experiences on the bench.
Now we move to hedging and hemming and hawing? I'll ask the next
question they'd all be better off not spending the weekend fielding... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Cornell law professor Eduardo M. Peñalver, who
clerked on the Second Circuit for Judge Guido Calabresi and on the
Supreme Court for Justice John Paul Stevens:
As some of you have pointed out, considered in the context the rest of her speech, it is clear that Sotomayor merely meant
that appointing “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences” to the bench would (on average) do more to improve
judicial decision-making than appointing a(nother) comparably wise
white male judge. Understood in this way, the comment is benign and,
more importantly, almost certainly true.
Crucial to understanding Judge Sotomayor’s argument is... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)