Word: sotomayor
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...thousands of cases Sonia Sotomayor has heard during nearly 17 years on the federal bench, the one likely to raise the toughest questions during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, which begin on July 13, involves affirmative action. In 2007 Sotomayor, as a member of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, heard arguments in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano. In that case, white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., challenged the city's decision to ignore the results of a promotion test after there were no black firefighters among the top scorers. One of 20 white firefighters who brought the case...
...During the oral argument for the case, Sotomayor was an active questioner, but the decision eventually released by her three-judge panel was a brief, unsigned order. With little explanation, it affirmed the lower-court decision dismissing the firefighters' claim that the city discriminated against the white firefighters by throwing out the test. In a subsequent opinion, one of Sotomayor's colleagues and longtime mentors, Judge José Cabranes, criticized the panel for disposing in such a cursory way issues that were "indisputably complex and far from well-settled." Ricci and the others appealed the panel's ruling...
...Sotomayor's decisions may ring a bell. It was she who ruled in 1999 that a law-school graduate with a learning disability was entitled to extra time to take a bar exam. More recently, she forbade the Environmental Protection Agency to use a cost-benefit analysis in antipollution enforcement (her ruling was later overturned). But the real fight over her confirmation will focus on her role in a case about tests for promotion within the New Haven, Conn., fire department. Although the tests were designed to be race-neutral, the pass rate for blacks was half that for whites...
...like racial preferences, they involve a way of looking at the law that is sophisticated rather than commonsensical. If the New Haven opinion is fair, it is the kind of fairness you learn at Yale Law School, not the kind you learn in the South Bronx. Sotomayor may be a child of the barrio, culturally speaking, but the judicial philosophy she represents comes from the mandarin, not the proletarian, wing of the Democratic Party...
...Read "Smooth Sailing: Sotomayor Headed to Easy Confirmation...