Ethics

Sotomayor and Discrimination Cases

By Ed Brayton

The big argument from the right wing about Sotomayor and Obama's desire for a judge with empathy boils down to this: She's so liberal and politically correct and so empathetic about the suffering of minorities that she'll ignore the law and find every powerful person or company guilty of discrimination even if they can't meet the legal standard for such an accusation and even if the evidence does not support such a conclusion.

That's what they mean when they say that a judge should not care about the identity of the people involved, they should merely interpret the law and forget about what might seem fair or just. So what does Sotomayor's record on that subject say? Quite the opposite, it turns out. Tom Goldstein of ScotusBlog has the results of his study of her rulings in such cases:

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on June 01, 2009 (boomark / email).