Sonia sotomayor liberal or conservative
Sonia Sotomayor
US Supreme Court justice since
Sonia Sotomayor | |
|---|---|
Official portrait, | |
Incumbent | |
| Assumed office August 8, | |
| Nominated by | Barack Obama |
| Preceded by | David Souter |
| In office October 7, &#;– August 6, | |
| Nominated by | Bill Clinton |
| Preceded by | J.
Daniel Mahoney |
| Succeeded by | Raymond Lohier |
| In office August 12, &#;– October 7, | |
| Nominated by | George H. W. Bush |
| Preceded by | John M. Walker Jr. |
| Succeeded by | Victor Marrero |
| Born | Sonia Maria Sotomayor () June 25, (age&#;70) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Spouse | Kevin Noonan &#; &#; (m.&#;; div.&#;)&#; |
| Education | |
| Signature | |
Sonia Maria Sotomayor (, Spanish:[ˈsonjasotomaˈʝoɾ];[1] born June 25, )[2] is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Sotomayor diabetes Octavia E. In a book on the Roberts Court, author Marcia Coyle assessed Sotomayor's position on the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment as a strong guarantee of the right of a defendant to confront his or her accusers. However, the panel supported the village's taking of the property for public use. Archived from the original on October 20,She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, , and has served since August 8, She is the third woman, the first woman of color, the first Hispanic, and the first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court.[3][a]
Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York City,[4] to Puerto Rican-born parents.
Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in and received her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in , where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.[4] She worked as an assistant district attorney in New York for four and a half years before entering private practice in She played an active role on the boards of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board.
Sotomayor was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in ; confirmation followed in In , she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her appointment to the court of appeals was slowed by the Republican majority in the United States Senate because of their concerns that the position might lead to a Supreme Court nomination, but she was confirmed in On the Second Circuit, Sotomayor heard appeals in more than 3, cases and wrote about opinions.
Sotomayor has taught at the New York University School of Law and Columbia Law School.
In May , President Barack Obamanominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court following the retirement of Justice David Souter. Her nomination was confirmed by the Senate in August by a vote of 68– While on the Court, Sotomayor has supported the informal liberal bloc of justices when they divide along the commonly perceived ideological lines.
During her Supreme Court tenure, Sotomayor has been identified with concern for the rights of criminal defendants and criminal justice reform, as demonstrated in majority opinions such as J. D. B. v.
Justina sotomayor biography February 3, Retrieved September 19, Assumed office August 8, Sonia Sotomayor is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, upon which she has served sinceNorth Carolina. She is also known for her impassioned dissents on issues of race and ethnic identity, including in Schuette v. BAMN, Utah v. Strieff, and Trump v.
Tj sotomayor biography: Sotomayor has maintained a public presence, mostly through making speeches, since joining the federal judiciary and throughout her time on the Supreme Court. Sotomayor became the youngest judge in the Southern District [ 92 ] and the first Hispanic federal judge in New York State. Archived from the original on September 24, Archived from the original on January 28,
Hawaii.
Early life
Sotomayor[5] was born in the New York City borough of the Bronx.[6] Her father was Juan Sotomayor (c. –),[7] from the area of Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico,[8][9][10] and her mother was Celina Báez (–),[11] an orphan[12] from Santa Rosa in Lajas, a rural area on Puerto Rico's southwest coast.[10]
The two left Puerto Rico separately, met, and married during World War II after Celina served in the Women's Army Corps.[13][14] Juan Sotomayor had a third-grade education, did not speak English, and worked as a tool and die worker;[8] Celina Báez worked as a telephone operator and then a practical nurse.[7] Sonia's younger brother, Juan Sotomayor (born c.
), later became a physician and university professor in the Syracuse, New York, area.[15][16]
Sotomayor was raised a Catholic[3] and grew up in Puerto Rican communities in the South Bronx and East Bronx; she calls herself a "Nuyorican".[13] The family lived in a South Bronx tenement[17] before moving in to the well-maintained, racially and ethnically mixed, working-class Bronxdale Houses housing project[17][18][19] in Soundview (which has over time been thought as part of both the East Bronx and South Bronx).[20][21][22] In , the Bronxdale Houses were renamed in her honor.
Her relative proximity to Yankee Stadium led to her becoming a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees.[23] The extended family got together frequently[17] and regularly visited Puerto Rico during summers.[24]
Sotomayor and her parents
Sotomayor as a young girl
Sotomayor grew up with an alcoholic father and a mother who was emotionally distant; she felt closest to her grandmother, who she later said was a source of "protection and purpose".[12] Sotomayor was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age seven,[8] and began taking daily insulin injections.[25] Her father died of heart problems at age 42, when she was nine years old.[7][17] After that, she became fluent in English.[8] Celina Sotomayor put great stress on the value of education; she bought the Encyclopædia Britannica for her children, something unusual in the housing projects.[13] Despite the distance between the two, which became greater after her father's death and which was not fully reconciled until decades later,[12] Sotomayor has credited her mother with being her "life inspiration".[26]
Education
For grammar school, Sotomayor attended Blessed Sacrament School in Soundview,[27] where she was valedictorian and had a near-perfect attendance record.[22][28] Although underage, Sotomayor worked at a local retail store and a hospital.[29] Sotomayor has said that she was first inspired by the strong-willed children's book detective character Nancy Drew, but, after her diabetes diagnosis led her doctors to suggest a different career path, she was inspired to pursue a legal career and become a judge by watching the Perry Mason television series.[8][23][25] She reflected in "I was going to college and I was going to become an attorney, and I knew that when I was ten.
Ten. That's no jest."[23]
Sotomayor passed the entrance tests for and then attended Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx.[3][30] At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor was on the forensics team and was elected to the student government.[3][30] She graduated as valedictorian in [13] Meanwhile, the Bronxdale Houses had fallen victim to increasing heroin use, crime, and the emergence of the Black Spades gang.[17] In , the family found refuge by moving to Co-op City in the Northeast Bronx.[17]
College and law school
Sotomayor attended Princeton University.
She has said she was admitted in part due to her achievements in high school and in part because affirmative action made up for her standardized test scores, which she described as "not comparable to her colleagues at Princeton and Yale."[31][32] She would later say that there are cultural biases built into such testing[31] and praised affirmative action for fulfilling "its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run."[33]
Sotomayor described her time at Princeton as life-changing.[34] Initially, she felt like "a visitor landing in an alien country"[35] coming from the Bronx and Puerto Rico.[36] Princeton had few female students and fewer Latinos (about 20).[13][37] She was too intimidated to ask questions during her freshman year;[35] her writing and vocabulary skills were weak and she lacked knowledge in the classics.[38] She put in long hours in the library and worked over summers with a professor outside of class, and gained skills, knowledge and confidence.[13][37][38] She became a moderate student activist[30][39] and co-chair of the Acción Puertorriqueña organization, which served as a social and political hub and sought more opportunities for Puerto Rican students.[13][40][41] She worked in the admissions office, traveling to high schools and lobbying on behalf of her best prospects.[42]
As a student activist, Sotomayor focused on faculty hiring and curriculum, since Princeton did not have a single full-time Latino professor nor any class on Latin American studies.[43][44] A meeting with university president William G.
Bowen in her sophomore year saw no results,[41] with Sotomayor telling a New York Times reporter at the time that "Princeton is following a policy of benign neutrality and is not making substantive efforts to change."[45] She also wrote opinion pieces for the Daily Princetonian addressing the same issues.[13] Acción Puertorriqueña filed a formal letter of complaint in April with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, saying the school discriminated in its hiring and admission practices.[40][43][45] The university began to hire Latino faculty,[39][43] and Sotomayor established an ongoing dialogue with Bowen.[42]
Sotomayor also successfully persuaded professor Peter Winn, who specialized in Latin American history, to create a seminar on Puerto Rican history and politics.[43] Sotomayor joined the governance board of Princeton's Third World Center and served on the university's student–faculty Discipline Committee, which issued rulings on student infractions.[42][46] She also ran an after-school program for local children,[39] and volunteered as an interpreter for Latino patients at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital.[13][36][47]
Academically, Sotomayor stumbled her first year at Princeton,[36] but later received almost all A grades in her final two years of college.[46] Sotomayor wrote her senior thesis on Luis Muñoz Marín, the first democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico, and on the territory's struggles for economic and political self-determination.[13] The page work, "La Historia Ciclica de Puerto Rico: The Impact of the Life of Luis Muñoz Marin on the Political and Economic History of Puerto Rico, –",[48] won honorable mention for the Latin American Studies Thesis Prize.[49] As a senior, Sotomayor won the Pyne Prize, the top award for undergraduates, which reflected both strong grades and extracurricular activities.[13][30][46] In , she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa[13][50] and graduated summa cum laude with an A.B.
in history.[51] She was influenced by critical race theory, which would be reflected in her later speeches and writings.[52]
Sotomayor entered Yale Law School in the fall of [23] While she believes she again benefited from affirmative action to compensate for relatively low standardized test scores,[31][32] a former dean of admissions at Yale has said that given her record at Princeton, it probably had little effect.[42] At Yale she fit in well[18][53] although she found there were few Latino students.[41] She was known as a hard worker but she was not considered among the star students in her class.[18][53] Yale General Counsel and professor José A.
Cabranes acted as an early mentor to her to successfully transition and work within "the system".[54]
Sotomayor became an editor of the Yale Law Journal,[9] and was also managing editor of the student-run Yale Studies in World Public Order publication (later known as the Yale Journal of International Law).[55] She published a law review note on the effect of possible Puerto Rican statehood on the island's mineral and ocean rights.[13][30] She was a semi-finalist in the Barristers Union mock trial competition.[55] She served as the co-chair of a group for Latin, Asian, and Native American students, and continued to advocate for the hiring of more Hispanic faculty.[37][41]
Following her second year, she gained a job as a summer associate with the prominent New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.[56] By her own later evaluation, her performance there was lacking.[57] She did not receive an offer for a full-time position, an experience that she later described as a "kick in the teeth" and one that would bother her for years.[56][57] In her third year, she filed a formal complaint against the established Washington, D.C., law firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge for suggesting during a recruiting dinner that she was at Yale only via affirmative action.[30][41] Sotomayor refused to be interviewed by the firm further and filed her complaint with a faculty–student tribunal, which ruled in her favor.[41][43] Her action triggered a campus-wide debate,[54] and news of the firm's subsequent December apology made The Washington Post.[58]
In , Sotomayor was awarded a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.[9] She was admitted to the New York Bar the following year.[59][60]
Early legal career
On the recommendation of Cabranes, Sotomayor was hired out of law school as an assistant district attorney under New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau starting in [9][54] She said at the time that she did so with conflicted emotions: "There was a tremendous amount of pressure from my community, from the third world community, at Yale.
They could not understand why I was taking this job. I'm not sure I've ever resolved that problem."[61]
It was a time of crisis-level crime rates and drug problems in New York, Morgenthau's staff was overburdened with cases, and like other rookie prosecutors, Sotomayor was initially fearful of appearing before judges in court.[62] Working in the trial division,[63] she handled heavy caseloads as she prosecuted everything from shoplifting and prostitution to robberies, assaults, and murders.[9][13][64] She also worked on cases involving police brutality.[65] She was not afraid to venture into tough neighborhoods or endure squalid conditions in order to interview witnesses.[64][66]
In the courtroom, she was effective at cross examination and at simplifying a case in ways to which a jury could relate.[64] In , she helped convict Richard Maddicks (known as the "Tarzan Murderer" who acrobatically entered apartments, robbed them, and shot residents for no reason).[62][67] She felt lower-level crimes were largely products of socioeconomic environment and poverty, but she had a different attitude about serious felonies: "No matter how liberal I am, I'm still outraged by crimes of violence.
Sotomayor background Toshiko Akiyoshi changed the face of jazz music over her year career. Pace University. The Washington Monthly. January 16,Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous."[61] Hispanic-on-Hispanic crime was of particular concern to her: "The saddest crimes for me were the ones that my own people committed against each other."[8]
In general, she showed a passion for bringing law and order to the streets of New York, displaying special zeal in pursuing child pornography cases, unusual for the time.[30] She worked hour days and gained a reputation for being driven and for her preparedness and fairness.[23][62][68] One of her job evaluations labelled her a "potential superstar".[66] Morgenthau later described her as "smart, hard-working, [and having] a lot of common sense,"[69] and as a "fearless and effective prosecutor."[65] She stayed a typical length of time in the post[61] and had a common reaction to the job: "After a while, you forget there are decent, law-abiding people in life."[70]
Sotomayor and Noonan divorced amicably in ;[66] they did not have children.[21] She has said that the pressures of her working life were a contributing factor, but not the major factor, in the breakup.[68][71] From to , Sotomayor had an informal solo practice, dubbed Sotomayor & Associates, located in her Brooklyn apartment.[72] She performed legal consulting work, often for friends or family members.[72]
In , she entered private practice, joining the commercial litigation practice group of Pavia & Harcourt in Manhattan as an associate.[8][73] One of 30 attorneys in the law firm,[73] she specialized in intellectual property litigation, international law, and arbitration.[8][65][74][75] She later said, "I wanted to complete myself as an attorney."[23] Although she had no civil litigation experience, the firm recruited her heavily, and she learned quickly on the job.[73] She was eager to try cases and argue in court, rather than be part of a larger law firm.[73]
Her clients were mostly international corporations doing business in the United States;[30] much of her time was spent tracking down and suing counterfeiters of Fendi goods.[13][73] In some cases, Sotomayor went on-site with the police to Harlem or Chinatown to have illegitimate merchandise seized, in the latter instance pursuing a fleeing culprit while riding on a motorcycle.[13][73] She said at the time that Pavia & Harcourt's efforts were run "much like a drug operation", and the successful rounding up of thousands of counterfeit accessories in was celebrated by "Fendi Crush", a destruction-by-garbage-truck event at Tavern on the Green.[76]
At other times, she dealt with dry legal issues such as grain export contract disputes.[73] In a appearance on Good Morning America that profiled women ten years after college graduation, she said that the bulk of law work was drudgery, and that while she was content with her life, she had expected greater things of herself coming out of college.[71] In she became a partner at the firm;[38][55] she was paid well but not extravagantly.[77] She left in when she became a judge.[9]
In addition to her law firm work, Sotomayor found visible public service roles.[78] She was not connected to the party bosses that typically picked people for such jobs in New York, and indeed she was registered as an independent.[78] Instead, District Attorney Morgenthau, an influential figure, served as her patron.[69][78] In , Governor of New YorkMario Cuomo appointed Sotomayor to the board of the State of New York Mortgage Agency, which she served on until [79] As part of one of the largest urban rebuilding efforts in American history,[79] the agency helped low-income people get home mortgages and to provide insurance coverage for housing and hospices for sufferers of AIDS.[8] Despite being the youngest member of a board composed of strong personalities, she involved herself in the details of the operation and was effective.[69][78] She was vocal in supporting the right to affordable housing, directing more funds to lower-income home owners, and in her skepticism about the effects of gentrification, although in the end she voted in favor of most of the projects.[78][79]
Sotomayor was appointed by Mayor Ed Koch in as one of the founding members of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, where she served for four years.[8][80] There she took a vigorous role[78] in the board's implementation of a voluntary scheme wherein local candidates received public matching funds in exchange for limits on contributions and spending and agreeing to greater financial disclosure.[81] Sotomayor showed no patience with candidates who failed to follow regulations and was more of a stickler for making campaigns follow those regulations than some of the other board members.[69][78] She joined in rulings that fined, audited, or reprimanded the mayoral campaigns of Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudy Giuliani.[78]
Based upon another recommendation from Cabranes,[69] Sotomayor was a member of the board of directors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund from to [82] There she was a top policy maker[8] who worked actively with the organization's lawyers on issues such as New York City hiring practices, police brutality, the death penalty, and voting rights.[82] The group achieved its most visible triumph when it successfully blocked a city primary election on the grounds that New York City Council boundaries diminished the power of minority voters.[82]
During and , Sotomayor served on the board of the Maternity Center Association, a Manhattan-based non-profit group which focused on improving the quality of maternity care.[83][84][85]
Federal district judge
Nomination and confirmation
Sotomayor had wanted to become a judge since she was in elementary school, and in she was recommended for a spot by Democratic New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.[8] Moynihan had an unusual bipartisan arrangement with his fellow New York senator, Republican Al D'Amato, whereby he would get to choose roughly one out of every four New York district court seats even though a Republican was in the White House.[34][86][87][88] Moynihan also wanted to fulfill a public promise he had made to get a Hispanic judge appointed for New York.[21] When Moynihan's staff recommended her to him, they said "Have we got a judge for you!"[8] Moynihan identified with her socio-economic and academic background and became convinced she would become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.[13][78] D'Amato became an enthusiastic backer of Sotomayor,[89] who was seen as politically centrist at the time.[8][21] Of the impending drop in salary from private practice, Sotomayor said: "I've never wanted to get adjusted to my income because I knew I wanted to go back to public service.
And in comparison to what my mother earns and how I was raised, it's not modest at all."[8]
Sotomayor was thus nominated on November 27, , by President George H. W. Bush to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by John M. Walker Jr.[6]Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, led by a friendly Democratic majority, went smoothly for her in June , with her pro bono activities winning praise from Senator Ted Kennedy and her getting unanimous approval from the committee.[8][89][90] Then a Republican senator blocked her nomination and that of three others for a while in retaliation for an unrelated block Democrats had put on another nominee.[89][91] D'Amato objected strongly;[91] some weeks later, the block was dropped, and Sotomayor was confirmed by unanimous consent[63][89] of the full United States Senate on August 11, , and received her commission the next day.[6]
Sotomayor became the youngest judge in the Southern District[92] and the first Hispanic federal judge in New York State.[93] She became the first Puerto Rican woman to serve as a judge in a U.S.
federal court.[94] She was one of seven women among the district's 58 judges.[8] She moved from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, back to the Bronx in order to live within her district.[8]
Judgeship
Sotomayor generally kept a low public profile as a district court judge.[23] She showed a willingness to take anti-government positions in a number of cases, and during her first year in the seat, she received high ratings from liberal public-interest groups.[21] Other sources and organizations regarded her as a centrist during this period.[8][21] In criminal cases, she gained a reputation for tough sentencing and was not viewed as a pro-defense judge.[95] A Syracuse University study found that in such cases, Sotomayor generally handed out longer sentences than her colleagues, especially when white-collar crime was involved.[96] Fellow district judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum was an influence on Sotomayor in adopting a narrow, "just the facts" approach to judicial decision-making.[54]
As a trial judge, she garnered a reputation for being well-prepared in advance of a case and moving cases along a tight schedule.[21] Lawyers before her court viewed her as plain-spoken, intelligent, demanding, and sometimes somewhat unforgiving; one said, "She does not have much patience for people trying to snow her.
You can't do it."[21]
Notable rulings
On March 30, , in Silverman v. Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee, Inc.,[97] Sotomayor issued a preliminary injunction against Major League Baseball, preventing it from unilaterally implementing a new collective bargaining agreement and using replacement players.
Her ruling ended the baseball strike after days, the day before the new season was scheduled to begin. The Second Circuit upheld Sotomayor's decision and denied the owners' request to stay the ruling.[23][98][99] The decision raised her profile,[13] won her the plaudits of baseball fans,[23] and had a lasting effect on the game.[] In the preparatory phase of the case, Sotomayor informed the lawyers of both sides that, "I hope none of you assumed that my lack of knowledge of any of the intimate details of your dispute meant I was not a baseball fan.
You can't grow up in the South Bronx without knowing about baseball."[]
In Dow Jones v. Department of Justice (),[] Sotomayor sided with the Wall Street Journal in its efforts to obtain and publish a photocopy of the last note left by former Deputy White House CounselVince Foster. Sotomayor ruled that the public had "a substantial interest"[] in viewing the note and enjoined the U.S.
Justice Department from blocking its release.
In New York Times Co. v. Tasini (), freelance journalists sued the New York Times Company for infringement for The New York Times' inclusion in an electronic archival database (LexisNexis) of the work of freelancers it had published. Sotomayor ruled that the publisher had the right to license the freelancers' work.
This decision was reversed on appeal, and the Supreme Court upheld the reversal; two dissenters (John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer) took Sotomayor's position.[]
In Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group (also in ), Sotomayor ruled that a book of trivia from the television program Seinfeld infringed on the of the show's producer and did not constitute legal fair use.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld Sotomayor's ruling.
Court of Appeals judge
Nomination and confirmation
On June 25, , Sotomayor was nominated by President Bill Clinton to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which was vacated by J.
Daniel Mahoney.[6] Her nomination was initially expected to have smooth sailing,[23][] with the American Bar AssociationStanding Committee on the Federal Judiciary giving her a "well qualified" professional assessment.[]
However, as The New York Times described, "[it became] embroiled in the sometimes tortured judicial politics of the Senate."[] Some in the Republican majority believed Clinton was eager to name the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice and that an easy confirmation to the appeals court would put Sotomayor in a better position for a possible Supreme Court nomination (despite there being no vacancy at the time nor any indication the Clinton administration was considering nominating her or any Hispanic).
Therefore, the Republican majority decided to slow her confirmation.[18][][] Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh weighed in that Sotomayor was an ultraliberal who was on a "rocket ship" to the highest court.[]
During her September hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sotomayor parried strong questioning from some Republican members about mandatory sentencing, gay rights, and her level of respect for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.[90] After a long wait, she was approved by the committee in March , with only two dissensions.[90][] However, in June , the influential Wall Street Journal editorial page opined that the Clinton administration intended to "get her on to the Second Circuit, then elevate her to the Supreme Court as soon as an opening occurs"; the editorial criticized two of her district court rulings and urged further delay of her confirmation.[] The Republican block continued.[23][]
Ranking Democratic committee member Patrick Leahy objected to Republican use of a secret hold to slow down the Sotomayor nomination, and Leahy attributed that anonymous tactic to GOP reticence about publicly opposing a female Hispanic nominee.[][] The prior month, Leahy had triggered a procedural delay in the confirmation of fellow Second Circuit nominee Chester J.
Straub—who, although advanced by Clinton and supported by Senator Moynihan, was considered much more acceptable by Republicans—in an unsuccessful effort to force earlier consideration of the Sotomayor confirmation.[]
During , several Hispanic organizations organized a petition drive in New York State, generating hundreds of signatures from New Yorkers to try to convince New York Republican senator Al D'Amato to push the Senate leadership to bring Sotomayor's nomination to a vote.[] D'Amato, a backer of Sotomayor to begin with and additionally concerned about being up for re-election that year,[] helped move Republican leadership.[13] Her nomination had been pending for over a year when Majority LeaderTrent Lott scheduled the vote.[] With complete Democratic support, and support from 25 Republican senators including Judiciary chair Orrin Hatch,[] Sotomayor was confirmed on October 2, , by a 67–29 vote.[] She received her commission on October 7.[6]
The confirmation experience left Sotomayor somewhat angry; she said shortly afterwards that during the hearings, Republicans had assumed her political beliefs based on her being a Latina: "That series of questions, I think, were symbolic of a set of expectations that some people had [that] I must be liberal.
It is stereotyping, and stereotyping is perhaps the most insidious of all problems in our society today."[23]
Judgeship
Over her 10 years on the Second Circuit, Sotomayor heard appeals in more than 3, cases and wrote about opinions when she was in the majority.[13] The Supreme Court reviewed five of those, reversing three and affirming two[13]—not high numbers for an appellate judge of that many years[18] and a typical percentage of reversals.[]
Sotomayor's circuit court rulings led to her being considered a political centrist by the ABA Journal[75][] and other sources and organizations.[75][92][][][][] Several lawyers, legal experts, and news organizations identified her as someone with liberal inclinations.[][][] The Second Circuit's caseload typically skewed more toward business and securities law rather than hot-button social or constitutional issues.[18] Sotomayor tended to write narrow, practiced rulings that relied on close application of the law to the facts of a case rather than import general philosophical viewpoints.[18][] A Congressional Research Service analysis found that Sotomayor's rulings defied easy ideological categorization, but did show an adherence to precedent and an avoidance of overstepping the circuit court's judicial role.[] Unusually, Sotomayor read through all the supporting documents of cases under review; her lengthy rulings explored every aspect of a case and tended to feature leaden, ungainly prose.[] Some legal experts have said that Sotomayor's attention to detail and re-examination of the facts of a case came close to overstepping the traditional role of appellate judges.[]
Across some cases involving business and civil law, Sotomayor's rulings were generally unpredictable and not consistently pro-business or anti-business.[] Sotomayor's influence in the federal judiciary, as measured by the number of citations of her rulings by other judges and in law review articles, increased significantly during the length of her appellate judgeship and was greater than that of some other prominent federal appeals court judges.[] Two academic studies showed that the percentage of Sotomayor's decisions that overrode policy decisions by elected branches was the same as or lower than that of other circuit judges.[]
Sotomayor was a member of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts.[] In October , she presented the annual Judge Mario G.
Olmos Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley School of Law;[16] titled "A Latina Judge's Voice"; it was published in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal the following spring.[][] In the speech, she discussed the characteristics of her Latina upbringing and culture and the history of minorities and women ascending to the federal bench.[] She said the low number of minority women on the federal bench at that time was "shocking".[41] She then discussed at length how her own experiences as a Latina might affect her decisions as a judge.[] In any case, her background in activism did not necessarily influence her rulings: in a study of 50 racial discrimination cases brought before her panel, 45 were rejected, with Sotomayor never filing a dissent.[41] An expanded study showed that Sotomayor decided 97 cases involving a claim of discrimination and rejected those claims nearly 90 percent of the time.[] Another examination of Second Circuit split decisions on cases that dealt with race and discrimination showed no clear ideological pattern in Sotomayor's opinions.[]
In the Court of Appeals seat, Sotomayor gained a reputation for vigorous and blunt behavior toward lawyers appealing before her, sometimes to the point of brusque and curt treatment or testy interruptions.[13][] She was known for extensive preparation for oral arguments and for running a "hot bench", where judges ask lawyers plenty of questions.[][] Unprepared lawyers suffered the consequences, but the vigorous questioning was an aid to lawyers seeking to tailor their arguments to the judge's concerns.[] The Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which collected anonymous evaluations of judges by lawyers who appear before them, contained a wide range of reactions to Sotomayor.[13] Comments also diverged among lawyers willing to be named.
Attorney Sheema Chaudhry said, "She's brilliant and she's qualified, but I just feel that she can be very, how do you say, temperamental."[] Defense lawyer Gerald B. Lefcourt said, "She used her questioning to make a point, as opposed to really looking for an answer to a question she did not understand."[] In contrast, Second Circuit Judge Richard C.
Wesley said that his interactions with Sotomayor had been "totally antithetical to this perception that has gotten some traction that she is somehow confrontational."[] Second Circuit Judge and former teacher Guido Calabresi said his tracking showed that Sotomayor's questioning patterns were no different from those of other members of the court and added, "Some lawyers just don't like to be questioned by a woman.
[The criticism] was sexist, plain and simple."[] Sotomayor's law clerks regarded her as a valuable and strong mentor, and she said that she viewed them like family.[51]
In , Senate Democrats suggested Sotomayor, among others, to President George W. Bush as an acceptable nominee to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.[]
Notable rulings
Abortion
In the decision Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v.
Bush,[] Sotomayor upheld the Bush administration's implementation of the Mexico City Policy, which states that "the United States will no longer contribute to separate nongovernmental organizations which perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations."[] Sotomayor held that the policy did not constitute a violation of equal protection, as "the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds."[]
First Amendment rights
In Pappas v.
Giuliani (),[] Sotomayor dissented from her colleagues' ruling that the New York Police Department could terminate from his desk job an employee who sent racist materials through the mail. Sotomayor argued that the First Amendment protected speech by the employee "away from the office, on [his] own time", even if that speech was "offensive, hateful, and insulting", and that therefore the employee's First Amendment claim should have gone to trial rather than being dismissed on summary judgment.[]
In , Sotomayor wrote the opinion for United States v.
Quattrone.[] Frank Quattrone had been on trial on charges of obstructing investigations related to technology IPOs. After the first trial ended in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial, some members of the media had wanted to publish the names of the jurors deciding Quattrone's case, and a district court had issued an order barring the publication, even though their names had previously been disclosed in open court.
In United States v. Quattrone, Sotomayor wrote the opinion for the Second Circuit panel striking down this order on First Amendment grounds, stating that the media should be free to publish the names of the jurors. Sotomayor held that although it was important to protect the fairness of the retrial, the district court's order was an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech and violated the right of the press "to report freely on events that transpire in an open courtroom".[]
In , Sotomayor was on a three-judge panel in Doninger v.
Niehoff[] that unanimously affirmed, in an opinion written by Second Circuit Judge Debra Livingston, the district court's judgment that Lewis S. Mills High School did not violate the First Amendment rights of a student when it barred her from running for student government after she called the superintendent and other school officials "douchebags" in a blog post written while off-campus that encouraged students to call an administrator and "piss her off more".[] Judge Livingston held that the district judge did not abuse her discretion in holding that the student's speech "foreseeably create[d] a risk of substantial disruption within the school environment",[] which is the precedent in the Second Circuit for when schools may regulate off-campus speech.[] Although Sotomayor did not write this opinion, she has been criticized by some who disagree with it.[]
Second Amendment rights
Sotomayor was part of the three-judge Second Circuit panel that affirmed the district court's ruling in Maloney v.
Cuomo ().[] Maloney was arrested for possession of nunchucks, which at the time were illegal in New York; Maloney argued that this law violated his Second Amendment right to bear arms. The Second Circuit's per curiam opinion noted that the Supreme Court has not, so far, ever held that the Second Amendment is binding against state governments.
On the contrary, in Presser v. Illinois (), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment "is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state".[] With respect to the Presser v. Illinois precedent, the panel stated that only the Supreme Court has "the prerogative of overruling its own decisions,"[] and the recent Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v.
Sotomayor biography book Quattrone , Sotomayor wrote the opinion for the Second Circuit panel striking down this order on First Amendment grounds, stating that the media should be free to publish the names of the jurors. In office August 12, — October 7, Carrie Chapman Catt Frances Perkins. July 14,Heller (which struck down the District's gun ban as unconstitutional) did "not invalidate this longstanding principle".[] The panel upheld the lower court's decision dismissing Maloney's challenge to New York's law against possession of nunchucks.[] On June 2, , a Seventh Circuit panel, including the prominent and heavily cited judges Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, unanimously agreed with Maloney v.
Cuomo, citing the case in their decision turning back a challenge to Chicago's gun laws and noting the Supreme Court precedents remain in force until altered by the Supreme Court itself.[]
Fourth Amendment rights
In N.G. & S.G. ex rel. S.C. v. Connecticut (),[] Sotomayor dissented from her colleagues' decision to uphold a series of strip searches of "troubled adolescent girls" in juvenile detention centers.
While Sotomayor agreed that some of the strip searches at issue in the case were lawful, she would have held that due to "the severely intrusive nature of strip searches",[] they should not be allowed "in the absence of individualized suspicion, of adolescents who have never been charged with a crime".[] She argued that an "individualized suspicion" rule was more consistent with Second Circuit precedent than the majority's rule.[]
In Leventhal v.
Knapek (),[] Sotomayor rejected a Fourth Amendment challenge by a U.S. Department of Transportation employee whose employer searched his office computer. She held that, "Even though [the employee] had some expectation of privacy in the contents of his office computer, the investigatory searches by the DOT did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights"[] because here "there were reasonable grounds to believe" that the search would reveal evidence of "work-related misconduct".[]
Alcohol in commerce
In , Sotomayor was part of the judge panel that ruled in Swedenburg v.
Kelly that New York's law prohibiting out-of-state wineries from shipping directly to consumers in New York was constitutional even though in-state wineries were allowed to. The case, which invoked the 21st Amendment, was appealed and attached to another case. The case reached the Supreme Court later on as Swedenburg v. Kelly and was overruled in a 5–4 decision that found the law was discriminatory and unconstitutional.[]
Employment discrimination
Sotomayor was involved in the high-profile case Ricci v.
DeStefano that initially upheld the right of the City of New Haven to throw out its test for firefighters and start over with a new test, because the city believed the test had a "disparate impact"[] on minority firefighters. (No black firefighters qualified for promotion under the test, whereas some had qualified under tests used in previous years.) The city was concerned that minority firefighters might sue under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of