Legal News

Soto?s Senate Judiciary Answers . . . and Greg Craig?s Serious Advocacy

By Ashby Jones

The Senate Judiciary Committee has asked Judge Sotomayor to fill out this questionnaire. And mere moments ago, they were released. Click here for them.

We’ve looked through them briefly and what have we learned? A few things, actually. She was a summer associate at Paul Weiss in 1978 and worked at Yale’s general counsel office after her 1L year in 1977 (and at the Yale Law School’s “Mimeo Room” (Mimeo Room?!) during her 3L year).

She has honorary degrees from Princeton and CUNY’s Lehman College as well as the law schools at Northeastern, Pace, and Brooklyn. She introduced Justice Scalia at a talk at Hofstra in 2001; She holds a key to the city of Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. She feels that cases involving Fendi (former client), John Siffert of the firm Lankler, Siffert & Wohl (former colleague) and Princeton University could pose a conflict of interest.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of the release is White House counsel Greg Craig’s rather breathless statement about the nominee.

Of particular interest was this claim which, it struck us, could only have been made by a lawyer:

In an effort to advance her nomination through the Senate as swiftly as possible, Judge Sotomayor has completed her questionnaire faster than any Supreme Court nominee in recent history – in just 9 days. For historical context, it took Chief Justice Roberts 13 days, Justice Ginsburg 15 days and Justice Alito 30 days from the time they were designated to the time they completed their questionnaires. With her record of 17 years on the bench, this historically fast completion of the exhaustive questions is no small feat that will hopefully lead to her swift consideration by the Senate and enable her to be a member of the Supreme Court by the time they begin selecting cases in September.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 04, 2009 (boomark / email).