Sotomayor updates ......

Sotomayor’s Public Cheerleading for Obama [Ed Whelan]

In a speech that she delivered to the Black, Latino, Asian Pacific American Law Alumni Assocation on April 17, 2009—two weeks before news of the Souter vacancy broke—Judge Sotomayor made a number of references to President Obama that seem surprisingly and disturbingly partisan coming from a sitting federal judge:

“The power of working together was, this past November, resoundingly proven.” (p. 6)

“The wide coalition of groups that joined forces to elect America’s first Afro-American President was awe inspiring in both the passion the members of the coalition exhibited in their efforts and the discipline they showed in the execution of their goals.” (p. 7)

“On November 4, we saw past our ethnic, religious and gender differences.” (p. 10)

“What is our challenge today: Our challenge as lawyers and court related professionals and staff, as citizens of the world is to keep the spirit of the common joy we shared on November 4 alive in our everyday existence.” (p. 11)

“It is the message of service that President Obama is trying to trumpet and it is a clarion call we are obligated to heed.” (p. 13)

Canon 2 of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges provides that a judge “should act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” Sotomayor’s public cheerleading for Obama seems clearly to violate that ethical obligation.


Sotomayor’s “Affirmative Action Plan for Puerto Rico” [Ed Whelan]

The apparent answer to history professor K. C. Johnson’s question (see “Former (?) Puerto Rican Nationalist Nominated to North American Supreme Court”) about “when Sotomayor ceased being a Puerto Rican nationalist who favors independence”: By the time she was in law school and was instead advocating what law professor Roger Alford (on the Opinio Juris blog) calls an “affirmative action plan for Puerto Rico” statehood. Excerpts from Alford’s post about Sotomayor’s law-review piece:

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s student note in the 1979 Yale Law Journal is a piece of work. It makes an extravagant case for Puerto Rican statehood based on terms of accession that are more favorable to Puerto Rico than any other state in the Union. Her proposal is a sort of affirmative action plan for what she describes as a “small, economically poor dependency” acquired as a result of the “American experience with colonialism.”

While her legal arguments are complex, her economic and political conclusions are simple: Puerto Rico should become a state and accede to the Union in a manner that grants her ownership rights over the offshore oil, gas and mineral deposits within a two-hundred mile radius of Puerto Rico. It should do so despite the fact that no other state enjoys similar rights and despite over two centuries of federal practice that provide for states to enter the Union “on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever.” …

In short, in proposing preferential treatment for Puerto Rican statehood, Sotomayor manages to provide justifiable grounds to (1) upset environmentalists; (2) upset those sensitive to the equality of states; (3) upset those opposed to affirmative action and preferential treatment; and (4) upset those who do not take kindly to assertions that the United States is a colonial power. I would think almost every United States Senator falls into at least one of those four categories.