Thinking Citizen Blog — US Supreme Court VII: Sonia Sotomayor
By: John Muresianu
Tags: Supreme Court, USA, Culture, Justice, Thinking Citizen Blog

Thinking Citizen Blog — Saturday is Justice, Freedom, Law, and Values Day

Today’s Topic: US Supreme Court VII: Sonia Sotomayor (1954 — ) first Hispanic, third woman, liberal

Justice Sotomayor was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2009 and confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 68 to 31. During his presidential campaign, Obama had promised to nominate judges who had “the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old.” This was quite consistent with Sotomayor’s statement that “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” She has been an ardent supporter of affirmative action and of the rights of defendants while on the Court. Expert — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND — “I am the perfect affirmative action baby!” (Sotomayor)

1. Justice Sotomayor is a poster child of the American dream. “She grew up poor in a Bronx housing project at a time when gangs were carving up the neighborhood, learned she had juvenile diabetes when she was 7 and lost her father a couple of years later. She would go on to Princeton (where she won the prestigious Pyne Prize), Yale Law School, the Manhattan district attorney’s office and ultimately the Supreme Court…” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, second link)

2. She has stated that her relatively low standardized test scores would probably have kept her out of the Ivy League if it were not for affirmative action which she considered necessary “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.”

3. In 1991 she was appointed to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H W Bush. In 1997 she was nominated for the US Appeals Court for the Second Circuit by Bill Clinton. Her nomination was approved by a vote of 67 to 29.

NB: She published her memoirs in 2013: “My Beloved World.” A version for children came out in 2018, “Turning Pages: My Life Story.” As a child, she was a huge Nancy Drew and Perry Mason fan. “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.”

DISSENT IN SCHUETTE VERSUS COALITION TO DEFEND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION (2014)

1. Background: “In November 2006, Michigan voters adopted Proposal 2, an amendment to the Michigan Constitution prohibiting discrimination against or preferential treatment to individuals in public education, government contracting, and public employment on the basis of race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin.”

2. Supreme Court decision (2014) By a vote of 6 to 2 the Court held that the Equal Protection clause of the 14th amendment does not prevent state bans on affirmative action.

3. In her dissent she argued that Michigan voters had “changed the basic rules of the political process in that State in a manner that uniquely disadvantaged racial minorities.” She was joined in her dissent by Justice Ginsburg. Elena Kagan recused herself in the case.

DISSENT IN UTAH V STRIEFF (WHICH LIMITED THE SCOPE OF THE 4TH AMENDMENT)

1. By a vote of 5 to 3 the Court ruled that the evidence against the defendant was admissible arguing that “the discovery of a valid arrest warrant was a sufficient intervening event to break the causal chain between the unlawful stop and the discovery of drug-related evidence on Strieff’s person.”

2. Sotomayor dissented, “it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny…For generations, black and brown parents have given their children “the talk” — instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger — all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them.”

3. She cited Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Sotomayor wrote that the case “implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be catalogued” and that unlawful stops “corrode all our civil liberties”. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined all but part IV of Justice Sotomayor’s opinion. Justice Elena Kagan also wrote a dissenting opinion, in which Justice Ginsburg joined in full, where she argued that the majority’s ruling “creates unfortunate incentives for the police.”

Sonia Sotomayor

The Bronx, the Bench and the Life in Between (Published 2013)

Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action

Court Backs Michigan on Affirmative Action (Published 2014)

Utah v. Strieff

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YOUR TURN

Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to justice, freedom, the law or basic values. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to justice, freedom, the law, or basic values. Or just some random justice-related fact that blew you away.

This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply about something dear to your heart.