Confirming Sotomayor

Know Five Things
 

1. Who Is She?

• Judge Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton, where she was also a co-recipient of the M. Taylor Pyne Prize, the highest honor Princeton awards to an undergraduate. [Daily Princetonian]

• Judge Sotomayor went to Yale Law School, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and managing editor of the Yale Studies in World Public Order. [NYTimes]

• She would replace Justice Souter as the only Justice with experience as a trial judge. [White House]

• 1979: Sotomayor becomes Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, where she tried dozens of criminal cases over five years.

• 1984: Sotomayor enters private practice as a general civil litigator at the firm Pavia and Harcourt.

• 1992: President George H.W. Bush appoints Sotomayor to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. From 1992 to 1998, she presides over roughly 450 cases.

• 1998: President Clinton appoints Judge Sotomayor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where she participates in over 3000 panel decisions

2. Americans Want Her Confirmed

• In a just-released ABC News/Washington Post poll, 62 percent of the public says Sotomayorâ��s nomination to the Supreme Court should be confirmed by the Senate, compared to just 25 percent who think she shouldnâ��t be confirmed. [Washington Post]

• “But most Americans do not think her life experiences influence the way she decides cases: Fifty-nine percent said the fact that she is a women does not factor in, and 52 percent said the same about her racial and ethnic background.”

• This level of support is among the highest recorded for recent Supreme Court nominees. [CAP]

3. Issue: Mainstream Judge

• â��As a judge, she has a bipartisan pedigree. She was first appointed by a Republican, President George H.W. Bush, then named an appeals judge by President Bill Clinton in 1997.â�� [AP, 5/26/09]

• From the Brennan Center on Justice: “Even given the often-noted collegiality of the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has been in agreement with her colleagues more often than most – 94% of her constitutional decisions have been unanimous” [Brennan]

• More from Brennan: “She has voted with the majority in 98.2% of constitutional cases.”

• Even more from Brennan: “Republican appointees have agreed with her decision to hold a challenged governmental action unconstitutional in nearly 90% of cases.”

4. Issue: Tough On Crime

• According to a new study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, “high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor typically handed out tougher prison sentences than her colleagues in the federal courthouse in Manhattan, especially to white-collar criminals.” [ABC News]

5. Issue: Guns and the Second Amendment

• Senate Republicans held a news conference recently to try to attack Judge Sotomayer’s stance on the Second Amendment, specifically a court decision she participated in which said the Second Amendment’s “protection against curbs on bearing arms applies only to the federal government â�� not to states.” [AP]

• Problem with this attack: Even critic Sen. Jeff Sessions had to admit her position “was in line with Supreme Court precedent on the issue…and presumably in keeping with GOP views that judges should be restrained.”

• Problem with this attack: No one is sure what the attack should actually be. AP reports “Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, criticized Sotomayor for taking a ‘cramped and restricted view of a basic civil liberty.’ At the same time, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said Sotomayor had been too expansive in her ruling on the right to keep and bear arms.”

• Further Explanation: “Until very recently two Supreme Court decisions limited the scope of the Second Amendment. The first held that the Second Amendment only protects a limited right to participate in militias; the second held that the Second Amendment â��is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state.â�� Although the Supreme Court overruled the first of these precedents in its recent Heller decision, it has so far left the second precedent intact. Sotomayor was thus required to follow this binding Supreme Court precedent, and she did so when she held that the Second Amendment does not apply to state laws.” [CAP]

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