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So, Is She the First Hispanic Justice?

By Robert J. Ambrogi

Even as Sonia Sotomayor takes her seat as the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court, there remain those who question whether she is, indeed, the court's first Hispanic. Just this weekend, on a legal listserv I follow, someone asked, What about Justice Benjamin Cardozo? Wasn't he Hispanic? The question of Cardozo's heritage was floated even before Sotomayor was nominated. But why does it persist? Is it just another variant of the same strain of conspiracy theorist that bred the birthers, those who fervently believe -- the evidence be damned -- that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen? Having never given much thought to the question, I thought I'd try to sort it out for myself. The question comes up, at all, only because of an uncertain lineage that traces Cardozo's ancestors to Portugal. Cardozo's maternal and paternal grandparents were Sephardic Jews. Family tradition traced their ancestry back to Portugal. But Harvard Law School Prof. Andrew L. Kaufman, author of a 1998 biography of Cardozo, said there is no documentation to show that. Even if the family was from Portugal, it probably left during the 1490s, when many Jews were expelled from Spain and the Iberian Peninsula. The family came...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on August 10, 2009 (boomark / email).