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...survey of Sotomayor's 226 majority opinions, Stefanie Lindquist, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, found that only 38% could clearly be characterized as liberal, while 49% could clearly be considered conservative. When the criminal cases (in which appellate judges are encouraged by Supreme Court precedent to be relatively pro-prosecution) are taken out of the mix, Sotomayor's record looks about 46% liberal and 36% conservative...
Read "Four Enduring Myths About Supreme Court Nominees...
...from voting violated the federal Voting Rights Act. Sotomayor does not appear to be an outlier in race cases, although she seems to have no overarching theory about how to decide them. For that reason, she seems unlikely, in the short term, to affect the balance on the Roberts Court in cases involving race. At the moment, the court is divided among four color-blind conservatives who are suspicious of affirmative action, four liberals who are sympathetic to it, and Anthony Kennedy, who is skeptical of racial classifications but reluctant to strike all of them down, in the middle...
...Future Fault Lines But Sotomayor's unique background and views about race and gender are likely to become more important over time. In coming years, there may well be challenges to the death penalty, for example, on the grounds that it is imposed in a racially discriminatory way. The court rejected that claim in 1987, but Sotomayor might be sympathetic to it. In 1981, as a member of the board of directors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, she was part of a committee that recommended that the fund oppose the reinstatement of the death penalty...
...Sotomayor's more liberal inclinations in immigration cases may also make a difference on a court that will increasingly have to wrestle with legal distinctions in the U.S. between citizens and aliens. As Obama disappoints civil libertarians by reaffirming aspects of President Bush's antiterrorism policies - including the claim that terrorism detainees held by U.S. forces in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts - some of these policies may reach the Supreme Court. Sotomayor could prove skeptical of the claim often made by the government that the rights of aliens differ sharply from the rights...