Legal News

AP: Obama Taps Sotomayor

By Ashby Jones

This just in: According to the AP (link not available), President Obama has tapped Second Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace the departing Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Click here and here for previous LB posts focused on Judge Sotomayor.

Sotomayor was raised in the Bronx, later graduating from Princeton and Yale Law, and working as assistant DA and trial judge before ascending to the 2nd Circuit. She is poised to become the nation’s first Hispanic justice.

Earlier this month, Jeffrey Rosen penned a controversial piece in the New Republic on the judge called “The Case Against Sotomayor.”

Her clerks speak fondly of her, saying that because the judge is divorced, with no children of her own, she treats her clerks like family, inviting them to her apartment monthly for "card games (where she remembers their favorite drinks) and taking a field trip together to the premier of a Harry Potter movie," Rosen reports.

But she also has critics, according to Rosen, who says that former prosecutors and former clerks of other Second Circuit judges voiced reservations about Sotomayor, including that she can be domineering in oral arguments and that she can get bogged down in marginal details, failing to see the forest for the trees.

"I know the word on the street is that she's not the brainiest of people," said one former clerk of another judge, who said he did not share that opinion. "She's an incredibly impressive person [and] she's not shy or apologetic about who she is."

We’ll be following the development throughout the day. President Obama has scheduled a news conference on the topic for 10:15.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 26, 2009 (boomark / email).