Judging Sotomayor?

[unixronin]

Much has been written, on both sides, about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court. President Obama has repeatedly said that he feels the Supreme Court needs her “empathy”. Sotomayor herself has said on many occasions that “a wise Latina woman [...] would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male” when it comes to judging the law.

I have grave reservations about this nomination, and a few minutes ago, I realized how to distil out the central essence of why.

You see, the United States is a Constitutional republic, a nation of law, and the duty of the United States Supreme Court is to be the final judge and arbiter of the nations laws and their rectitude. It is the duty of the Supreme Court’s Justices to make their judgements as fairly, as correctly, and as objectively as they possibly can. Their responsibility is not to judge the ethnic sensitivity of the plaintiff or the hardships faced by the defendant; it is to judge the fairness, the correctness, and the Constitutional soundness of the applicable law itself. If the Supreme Court cannot be objective, it cannot properly discharge its duties and responsibilities.

Yet, our President is nominating to the United States Supreme Court a woman whose strongest and most vital qualification for the position — or so he tells us — is precisely that she is not objective.

Does anyone else see a problem with this?

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Much though I dislike (also detest, and despise) Proposition 8, after having read the key passages of the California Supreme Court's decision, I have to agree that they were right to rule as they did. Proposition 8 is mean-spirited, selfish and divisive, and I have the impression the Court themselves didn't much like it either, but the law and the details of the suit being what they were, realistically they could not defensibly rule any other way.


Actually, now that I think about it, there's an interesting parallel here. Sotomayor has been criticized as racist in light of Ricci v. Stefani, the New Haven, CT firefighter promotion case in which the city decided not to promote anyone because no black candidates passed the written examination, and the nineteen candidates who did pass, eighteen white and one Hispanic, sued the city on the grounds that the decision not to promote anyone at all because they couldn't promote any black firefighters was race discrimination. Second Circuit found in favor of the city, and the case will probably go to SCOTUS, but the interesting aspect from the point of view of Prop. 8 is that Sotomayor and four other justices wrote an opinion in which they stated that precedent basically did not allow them to rule any other way.