Word: latinas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...entire concept of the American rule of law is blindfolded justice.' JEFF SESSIONS, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, criticizing Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, for her 2001 remark that a "wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences," would be better equipped to make certain decisions than a white man would...
...Republican critics of Sotomayor are planning to use the Ricci decision as Exhibit A in what they hope will be confirmation hearings focused on her views about race. Exhibit B is a speech she delivered in 2001 that included the following 32 words: "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." Since President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to the court on May 26, that remark has become the main source of conservative attacks. Former Speaker...
...Richness of Experience The first speech in which Sotomayor introduced the "wise Latina" theme was delivered in Puerto Rico in 1994 and focused not on race but on gender. Sotomayor was responding to an article written by a colleague, Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, a federal judge in New York. Cedarbaum, like Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was an "equal treatment" feminist, who had expressed concern about the premise that women judges necessarily approach cases differently than men do. "Generalizations about the way women or men are," Ginsburg famously said, "cannot guide me reliably in making decisions...
...When Sotomayor gave her speech in 2001 at California's Berkeley School of Law, "A Latina Judge's Voice," she added "people of color" to the earlier passages that focused on gender. "I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice to the law and society," she wrote in a 2002 article based on the talk. And yet it is hard to portray her speeches as those of someone committed to the view that all women and minority judges have essentially different perspectives than white male judges. "No one person, judge...
...arise from being Hispanic? Sotomayor thinks so, if we believe the snippet from a 2001 speech at the University of California, Berkeley, law school that rippled across the Internet this week. She believes judges cannot help being affected by gender and ethnic identity. "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences," she said, "would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." This doesn't make Sotomayor a bad person or a racist, even if Rush Limbaugh has called...