President Obama has announced his pick to replace Justice David Souter - Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who would be the first hispanic to join the Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor was first picked by George H. W. Bush for a judgeship, and was elevated to the Court of Appeals by Bill Clinton. Her views are characterized as "moderate-liberal" by most analysts.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/26/supreme.court/index.html
It will be interesting to see what kind of fight is staged here. This seems like a more-or-less middle-of-the-road appointment for a very liberal president to make. However, Congress has very few examples in the last 28 years of any Supreme Court nomination which did engender pretty nasty battles and unpleasant rhetoric.
4 comments:
Sotomayor is very liberal in the judge sense. She thinks (and has publicly said) that law should be made in the courts!
She's very pragmatic, so she's not a principled liberal. She tends to fall on the side of the "oppressed" which engenders more liberal understandings of the law.
It will be interesting to see what happens in her confirmation hearings. I can see her getting into trouble for some of her views, from both sides.
And technically Benjamin Cardozo was the first hispanic justice. Portuguese/Jewish ancestry.
When did Benjamin Cardozo serve? I do not recognize the name.
Back in the 1930's. He's best remembered for developing the concept of proximate cause in tort law in the Palsgraf case (before his SCOTUS term). His name came up ALL the time in law school, the guy was involved in a lot of major cases.
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