Morning Bell: Sotomayor’s Troubling Record

Conn Carroll / May 27, 2009

There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There’s not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there is the United States of America.

– Then Illinois state senator Barack Obama, speaking to the 2004 Democratic Convention in 2004.

The wise man is the detached man. …he is a runner stripped for the race; he can weigh the conflicting factors of his problem without always finding himself in one scale or the other.

– Judge Learned Hand, eulogizing the first Hispanic Justice on the Supreme Court, Justice Benjamin Cardozo in 1938.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences … our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. … I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

– President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor, speaking to a >Berkeley La Raza Law Journal in 2001. (more…)