Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/justice-sotomayor-and-criminal-justice-in-the-real-world
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 17:08:48+00:00

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As part of the symposium to reflect on Justice Sotomayor’s first five years on the Supreme Court, this Essay explores Justice Sotomayor’s contributions to the Court’s criminal law jurisprudence. Professor Rachel Barkow argues that Justice Sotomayor’s prior experience working on criminal law cases as a prosecutor and trial judge have influenced her Supreme Court opinions, which focus on how things actually work in practice, pay close attention to the specific facts of cases, and show sensitivity to the need for checks on government power. These commitments often lead Justice Sotomayor to reject formal rules that would promote predictability at the expense of accurately reflecting the world in which the rules must operate.
Five years later, we can take stock of how her direct experience working on criminal law cases has influenced her jurisprudence on the Court. Justice Sotomayor’s view in criminal cases is firmly grounded in how things actually work in practice, and she pays close attention to the specific facts of cases before her. Her experience as an assistant district attorney and trial judge also seems to have made her attuned to the need for checks on government power. Obviously, not all state prosecutors who go on to become trial judges will bring the same perspective. Justice Sotomayor’s views are likely also influenced by her personal life history and general perspective on the role of a judge in a system of separated powers. But the combination of Justice Sotomayor’s background, outlook, and professional experience have given the Court a perspective on criminal justice that it has been lacking: one that is fully informed by how things work on the ground and how real people interact with criminal justice policies in the vast majority of cases in the system. Justice Sotomayor’s rich knowledge of the criminal justice system, coupled with her meticulous reading of the record below and attention to empirical studies, often leads her to reject bright-line rules that would promote predictability but at the expense of accurately reflecting what is happening on the ground. She has been a strong voice in favor of making sure that the Court’s rules never lose sight of the real world in which they need to apply.
The New York Times recently published an editorial calling for more diversity on the federal bench. It observed that traditionally this focus has been on “race, ethnicity and gender” but noted that “[e]qually important is the diversity of professional experience, which gets less attention.”4 Justice Sotomayor’s contribution to the Supreme Court’s criminal justice jurisprudence is a vivid illustration of why diversity in professional experience matters.
Justice Sotomayor has already established herself as a powerful voice in criminal law cases. Justice Sotomayor authored seventy-two total opinions during the period between the start of the 2009 Term and the end of the 2012 Term, and thirty-six percent of them were in criminal law.5 She has written major opinions for the Court as well as important concurrences and dissents, including dissents from the denial of certiorari.6 While she often votes for greater defendant protections, she sometimes sides with the government even when the Court is divided.7 She frequently calls upon “common sense” to help guide the Court in criminal cases. Common sense is obviously a vague term that may vary from person to person, but when Justice Sotomayor uses this term, she seems to mean knowledge of what is actually happening on the ground, informed by the trial record, empirical studies, and, in Justice Sotomayor’s case, a deep knowledge of the criminal justice system and the participants in it from her own experience. This core approach can be seen across a range of criminal law areas.
While Justice Sotomayor put these examples in a footnote, they are in many ways the heart of the opinion. They provide real world examples of what discussions between the police and suspects actually sound like. Real world suspects who use “colloquial language”—as Justice Sotomayor knows well from her own experience as a Manhattan prosecutor—are not going to know “the magic words” to make questioning stop. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent rejected the majority’s rule because of an appreciation of the reality of the interactions between the police and suspects. The majority’s rule may create a bright line that makes it easier for the police to know when they can proceed, but it comes at a cost that suspects who wish to remain silent may not be able to effectuate that right in the coercive setting of police custody. The dissent came out the other way because, given the reality of these interactions and the people participating in them, the police are better situated to clarify whether a suspect is waiving.
The opinion, in text and footnotes, was replete with examples of troublesome juror answers—including from those seated as jurors and alternates47—that the district judge’s “anemic questioning” did little to probe.48 Although the majority took heart that, of the seated jurors and alternates, eleven out of sixteen had no Enron connection, Justice Sotomayor focused on the fact that five of them did, a fact that did “not strike [her] as particularly reassuring.”49 She interpreted this information differently because of her close reading of the record of what actually went on in the trial court.
Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in Messerschmidt v. Millender50 is another case that reflects her meticulous reading of the record. Police officers in this case obtained a warrant to search the home of the former foster mother of a gang member, Bowen, in search of guns and gang-related material after Bowen had a domestic dispute with his ex-girlfriend. The majority concluded that the warrant was “not so obviously lacking in probable cause” that a reasonable officer would have recognized its shortcomings.51 The majority theorized that a reasonable officer could have viewed the altercation between Bowen and his girlfriend not as a mere domestic dispute but as gang-related because Bowen might have wanted to prevent the ex-girlfriend “from disclosing details of his gang activity to the police.”52 Justice Sotomayor demonstrated that this theory was at odds with the actual evidence in the record. She pointed to Detective Messerschmidt’s deposition, in which he admitted he had no reason to believe the assault was a gang crime.53 She looked at police “Crime Analysis” forms to find that the officers did “not check off ‘gang-related’ as a motive for the attack.”54 She turned to interviews of the victim that also made clear that the crime was one of domestic violence.
The common theme in all these cases is Justice Sotomayor’s focus on substance over formalism, on how actors on the ground actually behave as opposed to artificial presumptions.
The discussion in Part I emphasized cases in which Justice Sotomayor’s vote was grounded in common sense and her deep knowledge of criminal law’s operation on the ground. But those examples should not be read to suggest that Justice Sotomayor is willing to have common sense trump law. As other contributions to this symposium have made clear, she aims to be a faithful adherent to statutory text and not displace her views for those of the legislature.77 But in those many areas of law where there is necessarily a gray area—for example, where a reasonableness standard governs or where the Court’s creation of a test, such as Miranda, requires what is essentially common-law-like development of the boundaries of that test—Justice Sotomayor has shown that she is interested in making sure her decision is based on common sense. What she calls “common sense” comes from her life experience interacting with people from all walks of life, her deep knowledge of the criminal justice system, her meticulous attention to the record and the facts, her reading of empirical studies and expert assessments, and her observations of the real world and how average citizens behave in it.
And all of this is informed by her professional experience as a state prosecutor in a large urban area, which adds particular value to a Court that hears so many cases related to criminal law. Her prosecutorial experience was with the huge and varied caseload of the New York City district attorney’s office. She was working in the core of America’s criminal justice system, where the states handle more than ninety-nine percent of all criminal cases.78 She saw violent crimes, petty misdemeanors, and everything in between. The range of defendants and victims with whom she interacted reflect the broad spectrum of individuals who end up in the criminal justice system. She undoubtedly had a similarly sweeping range of experiences with the police officers who worked on her cases and the jurors who heard them, both in state court when she was a prosecutor and in federal court where she sat as a trial judge.
She was in the thick of things, which meant she saw the system, warts and all. And most critically, she met the people who participate in that system, so she could see firsthand how rules operated when applied by and to those people.
Justice Sotomayor’s criminal law experience thus reflects the reality of criminal law administration in a way that Justice Alito’s time in the federal system does not. That may help explain why her votes in these cases often put her in opposition to, rather than in alignment with, the views of Justice Alito.84 While that can, of course, be attributed to the more traditional liberal/conservative divide in their outlook, the analysis in several criminal cases also suggests that this divergence stems from the different criminal justice experiences they bring. Justice Sotomayor’s experience as both a trial judge and a state prosecutor in a large urban jurisdiction means that she saw the entirety of the criminal justice system and she is particularly attuned to how things play out on the ground in that system. Facts were the focus of her work for eleven years, and her opinions as a Justice make clear that she is still just as interested in what happened as she is with the abstract legal issue or drawing formal lines that are divorced from the reality on the ground.
This focus on real-life actors and events is a particularly important perspective for the Court in criminal cases because the Court’s legal rulings must operate in a complicated world and be carried out by regular people. These rulings are far from abstract once they hit the ground. In an ever-growing criminal justice system, these decisions interact with real people every day. Justice Sotomayor’s opinions demonstrate that she is constantly alert to those real world impacts, and whether one agrees or disagrees with her conclusions in particular cases, it is hard to deny the benefit her vantage point brings to the Court’s jurisprudence.
The influence of her background on how cases are decided and on which cases the Court hears85 shows the value of professional experience diversity on the Court. A Court comprised exclusively of those with experience in federal government or appellate litigation would be a Court lacking critically important perspectives. Given the Court’s docket, it is crucial that it have the perspective of individuals like Justice Sotomayor who have trial court and state-level experience. To be sure, the current Court is still missing important viewpoints, including those of individuals with experience as defense lawyers. But Justice Sotomayor fills several key roles on the Court. Without her, it would be a Court far less in touch with the vast criminal justice system that operates in America today.
It is often remarked that the Justices pay more attention to a colleague’s view when it comes from his or her experience or expertise on the topic.86 As a result, one might expect that Justice Sotomayor will have an outsized influence on her colleagues in criminal cases. If her first five years on the Court are any indication, she is already well on her way, and the criminal justice system is improved as a result.
Rachel Barkow is the Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy and Faculty Director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at NYU School of Law. She is grateful to Billy Freeland for exceptional research assistance and to the Ford Foundation and to the Filomen D’Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Faculty Research Fund at NYU for generous support.
Preferred citation: Rachel E. Barkow, Justice Sotomayor and Criminal Justice in the Real World, 123 Yale L.J. F. 409 (2014), http://yalelawjournal.org/forum/justice-sotomayor-and-criminal-justice-in-the-real-world.
Berghuis v. Thompkins, 560 U.S. 370, 403 (2010) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).
Id. at 396-400 (majority opinion).
Id. at 410 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).
131 S. Ct. 2394 (2011).
Id. at 2407 (majority opinion).
132 S. Ct. 716 (2012).
Id. at 731 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (emphasis added).
Id. at 738 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).
133 S. Ct. 2072, 2078 (2013).
Id. at 2089 (Thomas, J., dissenting).
Id. at 2083 (citing Gall v. United States, 552 U.S. 38 (2007)).
130 S. Ct. 2896, 2942 (2010) (Sotomayor, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
Id. at 2960-63 and nn.23-24.
132 S. Ct. 1235 (2012).
Id. at 1247 (majority opinion).
Id. at 1254 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).
Id. at 1255 (quoting Joint App. 53-54).
Peugh v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 2072, 2084 (2013).
133 S. Ct. 1678 (2013).
Id. at 1693 (internal quotations and citations omitted).
132 S. Ct. 2044 (2012).
Id. at 2056 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).
Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of Hon. Sonia Sotomayor, to Be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 111th Cong. 238-39, 295 (2009), http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111shrg56940/html /CHRG-111shrg56940.htm [hereinafter Confirmation Hearing]; see also Press Release, The White House, Judge Sonia Sotomayor (May 26, 2009), http://www.whitehouse.gov /the_press_office/Background-on-Judge-Sonia-Sotomayor.
See, e.g., Anthony S. Barkow, Commentary: Sotomayor the Crime Fighter, CNN (July 16, 2009, 9:11 AM), http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/16/barkow.sotomayor.prosecutor (arguing that “Sotomayor’s experience on the front lines in a big city’s fight against crime will bring a much-needed perspective to the court” and a “much-needed dose of reality when it comes to criminal law issues”); Jess Bravin & Nathan Koppel, Nominee’s Criminal Rulings Tilt to Right of Souter, Wall St. J., June 5, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/news /articles/SB124415867263187033 (quoting a lawyer involved in trials before Sotomayor, who contrasted Sotomayor’s toughness on “white-collar defendants from privileged backgrounds” with her greater “understanding of individuals who grew up in a tougher circumstance”).
See, e.g., Bravin & Koppel, supra note 2 (citing Stanford Law School’s Jeffrey Fisher, who stated that Sotomayor’s ruling in a 1999 Fourth Amendment case illustrated a “willingness to give police the benefit of the doubt”); Ed Brayton, Sotomayor and Criminal Justice Law . . . . Again, ScienceBlogs (July 20, 2009), http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009 /07/20/sotomayor-and-criminal-justice (worrying that “Sotomayor will push the [C]ourt to the right when it comes to criminal justice issues”); Scott H. Greenfield, Saving Sonia, Simple Justice: A Criminal Defense Blog (July 17, 2009), http://blog.simplejustice.us /2009/07/17/saving-sonia (noting that “Justice Sotomayor may well become the Supreme Court’s reality check on criminal law cases,” but fearing that result because her experience was “that of a person who enforced order against the people”); David Lightman & Michael Doyle, Sotomayor Hearings Offer Lessons for Future Nominees, McClatchy (July 17, 2009), http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/07/17/72057/sotomayor-hearings-offer-lessons.html (asserting that one lesson from Sotomayor’s hearings is that “[n]o matter how liberal or conservative in general, be able to show you’re tough on crime,” and citing Sotomayor’s prosecutor background as being “immensely helpful in softening Republican fears”); James Ridgeway, The Progressive Case Against Sotomayor, Mother Jones (July 16, 2009, 6:26 AM), http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/07/progressive-case-against-sotomayor; Joe Stephens & Del Quentin Wilber, Gritty First Job Shaped Nominee, Wash. Post, June 4, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/03/AR2009060304054 _pf.html (citing Stetson University law professor Ellen S. Podgor, who reviewed around 100 of Sotomayor’s appellate rulings in white-collar cases and concluded that then-Judge Sotomayor “toes the line in terms of following what the law is, and in that respect [her opinions] come out as more pro-government”); Jeffrey Toobin, Analysis: Sotomayor a Cautious, Careful Liberal, CNN (July 17, 2009, 12:59 PM), http://www.cnn.com/2009 /POLITICS/07/13/toobin.sotomayor (arguing that “Sotomayor appears to feel disinclined to overturn criminal convictions” and may “lean more to the conservative side” on criminal law). In making the case for Sotomayor during her confirmation hearing, Senator Schumer emphasized that Sotomayor was “in the mainstream” and cited as one example the fact that “she has ruled for the government in 92 percent of criminal cases.” Confirmation Hearing,supra note 1, at 24-25.
Editorial, The Homogenous Federal Bench, N.Y. Times, Feb. 6, 2014, http://www.nytimes .com/2014/02/07/opinion/the-homogeneous-federal-bench.html.
Stat Pack Archive, SCOTUSBlog, http://www.scotusblog.com/reference/stat-pack (last visited Jan. 3, 2014) (accessed by clicking “Final Stat Pack” for each Term and then clicking “Total Opinion Authorship”). The “total opinions” statistic was drawn from SCOTUSBlog’s calculations from October Term 2009 through October Term 2012. Whether or not to classify a case as “criminal” is not a straightforward exercise, particularly in cases brought on habeas. Compare, for example, the different classification decisions regarding United States v. Comstock, 560 U.S. 126 (2010), which was classified as a criminal case by SCOTUSBlog, Super Stat Pack OT09 (July 7, 2010), http://www.scotusblog.com /wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Final-Stats-OT09-070710-19-21.pdf, and as a civil case by the Harvard Law Review, The Statistics, 124 Harv. L. Rev. 411, 422 (2010). To arrive at the numbers listed here, a case was characterized as criminal even if it was a habeas case if it implicated a broader criminal law issue.
See Andrew Pincus, Remarks at the Institutional Supreme Court Panel at the Yale Law Journal Symposium on Justice Sotomayor’s Early Jurisprudence (Feb. 3, 2014).
For example, she wrote the majority opinion in Dillon v. United States, 130 S. Ct. 2683 (2010), concluding that the Sentencing Commission’s policy statement governing retroactive sentence adjustments remains binding after Booker. Justice Stevens dissented because of his view that “[n]either the interests of justice nor common sense lends any support to the decision to preserve the single sliver of the Commission’s lawmaking power that the Court resurrects today.” Id. at 2705 (Stevens, J., dissenting). She has also taken a narrower view of what is covered by the Confrontation Clause than some of the other Justices. See, e.g., Bullcoming v. New Mexico, 131 S. Ct. 2705, 2721-22 (2011) (Sotomayor, J., concurring in part) (agreeing that a blood alcohol concentration report was testimonial under the facts of the case but highlighting instances that would be distinguishable and present no Confrontation Clause issues); Michigan v. Bryant, 131 S. Ct. 1143 (2011) (holding, in a majority opinion authored by Justice Sotomayor, that police questioning of a victim had the primary purpose of meeting an ongoing emergency over a strong dissent by Justice Scalia that accused the majority’s reading of the facts as being “so transparently false that professing to believe it demeans this institution,” id. at 1168 (Scalia, J., dissenting), and that criticized the majority for bringing reliability back into the Confrontation Clause calculus, id. at 1174).
Id. at 382 (suggesting that “police would be required to make difficult decisions about an accused’s unclear intent and face the consequence of suppression ‘if they guess wrong’”).
Id. at 411 n.9 (citing United States v. Sherrod, 445 F.3d 980, 982 (7th Cir. 2006); Burket v. Angelone,208 F.3d 172, 200 (4th Cir. 2000); State v. Deen,953 So.2d 1057, 1058-1060 (La. Ct. App. 2007)).
This explains why the first line of the dissent begins “The Court’s decision in this case may seem on first consideration to be modest and sensible . . . .” Id. at 2408 (Alito, J., dissenting).
Id. at 2401 (citing empirical studies that demonstrate a heightened risk of false confessions from juvenile suspects).
Id. at 2084. (citing U.S. Sentencing Comm’n, Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics 63 (16th ed. 2011)).
Kathleen Sullivan, Remarks at the Institutional Supreme Court panel at the Yale Law Journal Symposium on Justice Sotomayor’s Early Jurisprudence (Feb. 3, 2014).
Id. at 1250. Justice Kagan concurred in part and dissented in part. She agreed with the majority “that a reasonably competent police officer could have thought this warrant valid in authorizing a search for all firearms and related items” but disagreed that such a reasonable officer could think it “valid in approving a search for evidence of ‘street gang membership.’” Id. at 1251 (Kagan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
Id. (quoting the portion of the deposition where Detective Messerschmidt stated he did not have reason to believe there would be automatic weapons or handguns at the former foster mother’s home).
She also disagreed that “the warrant provided probable cause to believe any weapon possessed in a home in which 10 persons regularly lived—none of them a suspect in this case—was either ‘contraband or evidence of a crime.’” Id. (citing Ornelas v. United States, 517 U.S. 690 (1996)).
J.D.B. v. North Carolina, 131 S. Ct. 2394, 2407 (2011) (noting that officers and judges “simply need the common sense to know that a 7-year-old is not a 13-year-old and neither is an adult”).
Skilling v. United States, 130 S. Ct. 2896, 2948 (2010) (Sotomayor, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
See Cristina M. Rodríguez, Uniformity and Integrity in Immigration Law: Lessons from the Decisions of Justice (and Judge) Sotomayor, 123 Yale L.J. F. 499 (2014), http://yalelawjournal .org/forum/uniformity-and-integrity-in-immigration-law.
In 2010, for example, 20,437,849 (99.6%) criminal cases were filed in state courts; 77,287 (0.4%) were filed in federal courts. Criminal Caseloads Continue to Decline: Criminal Graphics 1, Ct. Stat. Project, (Sept. 24, 2012), http://www.courtstatistics.org/Criminal /20121Criminal.aspx (providing state case data under the “Get Data” hyperlink); Table D: U.S. District Courts—Criminal Cases Commenced, Terminated, and Pending (Including Transfers) During the 12-Month Periods Ending March 31, 2009 and 2010, U.S. Cts., http: 0)ner.: U.S. District Courts—g)o see using a " she cites before. I'think s?ly and makes any final recommendations would give it// http://www.uscourts.gov/Viewer.aspx?doc=/uscourts/Statistics/FederalJudicialCaseloadStatistics /2010/tables/D00CMar10.pdf (last visited Feb. 18, 2014) (showing 77,287 cases filed in U.S. district courts between April 1, 2009 and March 31, 2010).
Department of Justice statistics for financial year 2012 show that, for the federal criminal docket, 41.8% of the filed cases were immigration and 22.1% were drug cases. Fiscal Year 2012 Annual Statistical Report, U.S. Att’ys 10 (2012), http://www.justice.gov/usao /reading_room/reports/asr2012/12statrpt.pdf. Violent crimes made up 17.2% of the cases and 9.5% of the cases were white collar. Id.
See, e.g., Daniel C. Richman, The Changing Boundaries Between Federal and Local Law Enforcement, in 2 Boundary Changes in Criminal Justice Organizations 81 (Nat’l Inst. of Justice ed., 2000), https://www.ncjrs.gov/criminal_justice2000/vol_2/02d2.pdf (observing that “[w]hen [federal] agents seek to investigate ‘more episodic criminal activity,’ however, like murders, rapes, and street robberies, they generally must rely on help from local police departments, ‘the only entities whose tentacles reach every street corner’” (citations omitted)).
Guilty plea rates are high in both federal and state courts, but state prosecutors typically handle a much larger caseload. For example, in 2012, there were 15,107 pending cases in the criminal courts of New York County, 2,410 of which were pending felony cases. Annual Report 2012, Crim. Ct. of City of N.Y.16 (2013), http://www.nycourts.gov/COURTS /nyc/criminal/AnnualReport2012.pdf. There were 257 trial verdicts in New York County in 2012. Id. at 51. These cases would have been divided among the roughly 500 prosecutors working in the Manhattan DA’s Office. Annual Report: Highlights From 2012, N.Y. Cnty. Dist. Att’y’s Off. 1 (2013), http://manhattanda.org/sites/default/files/2012%20Annual %20Report%20Full.pdf. In addition, state prosecutors handle a huge misdemeanor docket. There were 11,477 misdemeanors, infractions, violations, and other low-level offenses in New York County in 2012. Annual Report 2012, supra. By contrast, there were a total of 62 criminal cases disposed of by trial in the Southern District of New York in 2012. Fiscal Year 2012 Annual Statistical Report, supra note 80, at 31. Those would be divided among the “more than 220 Assistant United States Attorneys.” About the Southern District Office,U.S. Dep’t Just., http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/aboutsdny.html (last visited Feb. 18, 2014).
Justice Alito’s own experience reflects this. While he appeared in district court “in a number of proceedings,” it does not appear that he had a great deal of trial experience before joining the Court. He stated in his response to a Senate questionnaire that as a practicing attorney he “focused almost exclusively on appellate matters,” but did “serve as lead trial counsel in two criminal cases tried to verdict or judgment, one jury and one non-jury.” He was also associate counsel in one jury trial. Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of Samuel A. Alito to Be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary,109th Cong. 78-79 (2006), http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG -109shrg25429/html/CHRG-109shrg25429.htm.
Of the 90 criminal and habeas cases decided since Justice Sotomayor joined the Court, she and Justice Alito have disagreed 40 times (44% disagreement rate). Sotomayor and Alito disagreed on 32 out of 66 criminal law cases (48%) and 8 out of 24 habeas cases (33%). These figures exclude summary reversals and cases where either Justices Sotomayor or Alito took no part. Skilling v. United States, 561 U.S. 358 (2010), is coded for these purposes as a disagreement because, while Sotomayor agreed with the Court in part, she dissented from its fair trial holding. For further explanation of the methodology used to calculate these figures, see supra note 5.
Her dissents from the denial of certiorari have predominantly been in criminal cases, which likely reflects her particular attention to key issues in that area. One can thus reasonably assume she plays a key role in influencing her colleagues on which cases to take, even if the dissents from the denial of certiorari shows those instances where her arguments were not successful. See Pincus, supra note 6.
Lee Epstein, William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice 309-10 (2013); see also Timothy R. Johnson et al., Oral Advocacy Before the United States Supreme Court: Does It Affect the Justices’ Decisions?, 85 Wash. U. L. Rev. 457, 512 (2007) (drawing on notes taken by Justice Blackmun at oral argument to suggest that he “may have been slightly more likely to note comments of those [Justices] he believed were experts in a particular area of law”). During Justice Sotomayor’s nomination, Jonathan Adler predicted that Justice Sotomayor’s criminal justice experience and “practical experience with sentencing defendants and trying to implement the Court’s criminal law opinions in the context of actual trials and actual cases . . . will affect the way the Court writes about and explains . . . the criminal law area.” Sotomayor Seen as Moderate on Criminal Justice, Nat’l Pub. Radio (July 7, 2009), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106358266.

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