Sunday, June 7, 2009

Does Sotomayor's Past Shows a Propensity to be Swept Away by Radical Causes or Theories That Relate to Her Identity?

Paul Mirengoff looks at some of Sotomayor's more controversial statements and opinions and sees a pattern. The pattern is that Sotomayor seems to take on the fringe view when she can identify with it personally.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/06/023726.php

"As we learn more about Judge Sotomayor's past, a pattern emerges -- her prospensity to be swept away by whatever radical cause or theory to which she is exposed that relates to her identity.

In her senior thesis at Princeton, Sotomayor wrote that she is a Puerto Rican nationalist who favors independence from the United States. This was a "fringe" position among Puerto Ricans, as Sotomayor effectively acknowledged when she noted that in the then-most-recent referendum, less than 1 percent of them voted in favor of independence.

In her thesis, Sotomayor punctuated her radical nationalism by referring to the United States Congress as the "North American Congress" or the "mainland Congress." At least she didn't call it the "running dog imperialist Congress." As Princeton's former president William Bowen says, she was always respectful.

As a law school student, Sotomayor no longer advocated Puerto Rican independence. She now favored statehood, but on radical terms.
...
By the mid 1990s, at the latest, Sotomayor was under the sway of feminist legal dogma. This is evident from a 1994 speech on "Women in the Judicary." Here, in a preview of her more notorious 2001 "Wise Latina" address, Sotomayor takes on the view of Justice O'Connor and New York federal Judge Miriam Cedarbaum that men and women should not (and that good judges do not) rule based upon their own gender. As Wendy Long points out, Sotomayor argued that women make different and "better" decisions than men, better meaning "a more compassionate, and caring conclusion."

Here, as in the "Wise Latina" speech, Sotomayor tosses around the views of the radical feminist law professor Martha Minnow, her law school classmate. In particular, she refers to Minnow's rather sophomoric response to Justice O'Connor's claim that a wise old female judge will reach the same conclusion as a wise old male judge -- that there is no universal definition of "wise."

In her "Wise Latina" speech of 2001, Sotomayor lifted the "feminist jurisprudence" of the 1994 address to posit a "Latina jurisprudence." In a sense, that speech synthesized the ethnic radicalism of her Princeton and Yale law school days with the radical feminist theories she had picked up from the writings of Professor Minnow and others."

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Berman Post: Specter's Defection May Hurt Obama in Picking a New Supreme Court Justice
Berman Post: ObamasFrontrunners.com
Berman Post: Obama Nominates Sonia Sotomayor For Supreme Court Justice
Berman Post: Is Sotomayor a Racist?
Berman Post: When Life Experience Apparently Matters (in Politics)
Berman Post: Harry Reid on Sotomayor - "She's Written Hundreds And Hundreds of Opinions. I Haven't Read a Single One of Them"
Berman Post: Sotomayor Made Other Sexist Comments
Berman Post: Aide To Sotomayor - "Don't Answer Any Questions", Sotomayor to Aide - "I Know"
Berman Post: Sotomayor Was a Member of La Raza For Six Years
Berman Post: Sotomayor's Senior Thesis
Berman Post: Sotomayor Repeatedly Made 'Wise Latino Woman' Statements
Berman Post: Sotomayor Questionnaire Omits Death Penalty Memo, Said Death Penalty Is Racist
Berman Post: Sotomayor And Liberalism (She Said She Does Not Know What Liberalism is After Calling Herself One)

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