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...Moderate on the Bench Although Sotomayor's speeches raise legitimate questions about her views on essential race and gender differences, the best evidence that she is no radical multiculturalist in the courtroom is found in her judicial opinions. Here she appears to be an incrementalist rather than a radical of any stripe. In a 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...
...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...
...civil rights cases - including race, gender and immigration appeals - Sotomayor tilts more to the left; Lindquist characterized her majority opinions as 54% liberal and 46% conservative. But when you break out the seven majority opinions involving race, only three rule in favor of the discrimination plaintiffs. It's in the immigration and gender cases that Sotomayor shows clearer signs of liberal leanings: out of 28 majority opinions in immigration cases, Sotomayor decided in favor of the immigrant in 17, or 61%. And in four gender cases, involving sex discrimination and sexual harassment, she decided in favor of the plaintiff...
...have violated the First Amendment when it fired a police officer for his racist, anonymous speech. And in Hayden v. Pataki (2006), Sotomayor said that a New York State law barring felons 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...
...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...