Sonia Sotomayor Pick Surprised Me
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Supreme Court
I know she was the most buzzed about, but I genuinely didn’t think he was going to go with her because there’s a good chance it’ll turn into a fight given some of her past statements. Also, some of the left were whispering that they weren’t too impressed with her intellect, so I thought Obama would want to avoid any sort of Harriet Miers situation.
However, you can tell the administration is trying to do a very heavy sell job to the moderate Repubs and conservative Dems right now.
From the talking points they put out…
- Before she was promoted to the Second Circuit by President Clinton in 1998, she was appointed to the District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H.W. Bush – a show of bipartisan support that proves good judging transcends political party.
- Known as a moderate on the court, Sotomayor often forges consensus and agreeing with her more conservative nominees far more frequently than she disagrees with them. In cases where Sotomayor and at least one judge appointed by a Republican president were on the three-judge panel, Sotomayor and the Republican appointee(s) agreed on the outcome 95% of the time.
- Judge Richard C. Wesley, a George W. Bush appointee to the Second Circuit, said “Sonia is an outstanding colleague with a keen legal mind. She brings a wealth of knowledge and hard work to all her endeavors on our court. It is both a pleasure and an honor to serve with her.”
What do you think? Good choice?
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 and is filed under Supreme Court. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 26th, 2009 at 10:48 am
The first two talking points you mentioned are a little anæmic. As to the first: district courts are quite different animals to appellate courts, and it certainly doesn’t follow that a judgment that someone is a good fit for a seat on the former implies a judgment that someone is a good fit for the latter. (The Supreme Court is, of course, is different to both in many important ways, but it is still fundamentally an appellate court.) Moreover, if the goal is to reach across the aisle, it lacks bite to point to appointment by Bush 41 as an indicator that she is a moderate given that the man she will succeed was also appointed by Bush 41 yet has been a reliable member of the liberal bloc almost ever since.
As to the second: known to whom as a moderate? Is that 95% figure just a raw number, or is it normalized for divided panels? Only a layperson could be impressed with the claim that courts of appeals judges agree with one another in 95% of cases. Justices Thomas and Ginsburg, after all, agree with each other in north of 95% of cases; it’s only when you take out the unanimous cases and look at the divided cases that things start to appear more fractious. And, lastly, it misses the mark to think only in terms of the outcome; in appellate judging, where one is dealing with legal issues where the case is in some ways representative of a broader class of cases involving the same issues, who wins is less important than why. In MainStreet Organization of Realtors v. Calumet City, 505 F.3d 742 (7th Cir. 2007), for example, one can say that the majority and the concurrence agreed on the outcome, but it would be grossly mistaken to think that they were fundamentally in accord simply because both concluded that the same litigant prevailed.