Legal News

At Least Sotomayor Will Commit On Brown v. Board of Education

By Jess Bravin

At her confirmation hearing last week, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor took extraordinary pains to avoid saying anything that conceivably could spark the tiniest bit of controversy from any possible constituency. But in written answers to follow-up questions, the federal appeals judge from New York may have taken caution to a hitherto unknown level.

Five Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee posed questions that seemed more designed to stake out their own positions on issues such as abortion and gun rights than to elucidate Sotomayor’s, since they knew full well that no judicial nominee will comment on issues likely to come before the court.

Likewise, Judge Sotomayor declined to offer her assessment of any “recent” Supreme Court decision, other than to say that “I accept it as precedent.”

In his written queries, Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) asked Sotomayor’s views on several historic cases. For instance, what did she think of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that found school segregation unconstitutional? The unanimous decision, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, is often cited as the proudest moment of the American judiciary.

The case “is widely regarded as a correct interpretation” of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, Sotomayor wrote.

Okay then, how about Dred Scott v. Sandford? In that 1857 case, the Supreme Court upheld slaveowners’ rights because “[the negro] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and…might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

Abraham Lincoln, then running for Senate, said the decision effectively nullified the noble promises of the Declaration of Independence. In the Supreme Court’s hands, the charter “is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.”

Sotomayor was more circumspect in describing Dred Scott. The ruling, she wrote, “is widely regarded as wrongly decided.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 20, 2009 (boomark / email).