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yes.
Ricci v. DeStefano proves it. Well, that's she's a racist or is incompetent.
You choose.
The speech continued and concluded..Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.
However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.
I also hope that by raising the question today of what difference having more Latinos and Latinas on the bench will make will start your own evaluation. For people of color and women lawyers, what does and should being an ethnic minority mean in your lawyering? For men lawyers, what areas in your experiences and at udes do you need to work on to make you capable of reaching those great moments of enlightenment which other men in different cir stances have been able to reach. For all of us, how do change the facts that in every task force study of gender and race bias in the courts, women and people of color, lawyers and judges alike, report in significantly higher percentages than white men that their gender and race has shaped their careers, from hiring, retention to promotion and that a statistically significant number of women and minority lawyers and judges, both alike, have experienced bias in the courtroom?
Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with su ion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as cir stances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.
There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering. We, I mean all of us in this room, must continue individually and in voices united in organizations that have supported this conference, to think about these questions and to figure out how we go about creating the opportunity for there to be more women and people of color on the bench so we can finally have statistically significant numbers to measure the differences we will and are making.
I am delighted to have been here tonight and extend once again my deepest gra ude to all of you for listening and letting me share my reflections on being a Latina voice on the bench. Thank you.
yes.
Ricci v. DeStefano proves it. Well, that's she's a racist or is incompetent.
You choose.
Care to expound on the case Yoni? Os is that what some right wing blog stated?
Considering the source I say neither. Why don't you refute the whole speech yoni?
Because, I have no interest in refuting the speech. I'm interested in how you square her racist statement with the color-blind position of a Supreme Court Justice.
And, actually, it was Judge that overturned her ruling that left the question of competence or racism open. Frankly, he found her one paragraph decision a little lacking, to say the least.
You have no interest in having an honest and open debate? Shocking..
The speech doesn't change my impression of the quote. Why do you want to talk about the speech -- those are just words without any authority?
Let's talk about her judicial racism...
R-A-C-I-S-TA striking opinion this past June by highly regarded Second Circuit judge (and Clinton appointee) José Cabranes exposes some remarkable and disturbing shenanigans by Sotomayor. Cabranes’s opinion, joined by five of his colleagues (including Chief Judge Jacobs), dissented from his court’s narrow 7-6 denial of en banc rehearing in Ricci v. DeStefano. (Cabranes’s opinion begins on the ninth page of this Second Circuit order.)
In Ricci, 19 white firefighters and one Hispanic firefighter charged that New Haven city officials engaged in racially discriminatory practices by throwing out the results of two promotional exams. As Cabranes puts it, “this case presents a straight-forward question: May a municipal employer disregard the results of a qualifying examination, which was carefully constructed to ensure race-neutrality, on the ground that the results of that examination yielded too many qualified applicants of one race and not enough of another?”
The district judge, Janet Bond Arterton, issued a 48-page summary-judgment order ruling against the firefighters. Summarizing Arterton’s opinion, Cabranes clearly finds highly unusual that Arterton could grant summary judgment for the city officials notwithstanding her acknowledgement that the evidence was sufficient to enable a jury to find that the city officials “were motivated by a concern that too many whites and not enough minorities would be promoted.” Further, Cabranes finds it remarkable that such a “path-breaking opinion” was “nevertheless unpublished.”
On appeal, Cabranes’s account indicates, the judicial effort to bury the firefighters’ claims got worse. In a case in which the parties “submitted briefs of eighty-six pages each and a six-volume joint appendix of over 1,800 pages,” in which two amicus briefs were filed, and in which oral argument “lasted over an hour (an unusually long argument in the practice of our Circuit),” the panel, consisting of Sotomayor and fellow Clinton appointees Rosemary Pooler and Robert Sack, “affirmed the District Court’s ruling in a summary order containing a single substantive paragraph”—which Cabranes quotes in full and which gives the reader virtually no sense of what the case is about. Four months later, just three days before Cabranes issued his opinion—and after the panel evidently knew that it had evaded en banc review—“the panel withdrew its summary order and published a per curiam opinion that contained the same operative text as the summary order, with the addition of a citation to the District Court’s opinion in the Westlaw and LexisNexis databases.” As Cabranes sums it up:
And then this killer understatement:This per curiam opinion adopted in toto the reasoning of the District Court, without further elaboration or substantive comment, and thereby converted a lengthy, unpublished district court opinion, grappling with significant cons utional and statutory claims of first impression, into the law of this Circuit. It did so, moreover, in an opinion that lacks a clear statement of either the claims raised by the plaintiffs or the issues on appeal. Indeed, the opinion contains no reference whatsoever to the cons utional claims at he core of this case, and a casual reader of the opinion could be excused for wondering whether a learning disability played at least as much a role in this case as the alleged racial discrimination.
Cabranes and his five colleagues clearly believe that Sotomayor and her panel colleagues acted as they did in order to bury the firefighters’ claims and to prevent en banc and Supreme Court review of them. Cabranes’s opinion expresses his “hope that the Supreme Court will resolve the issues of great significance raised by this case” and his judgment that plaintiffs’ claims are “worthy of [Supreme Court] review.”This perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal.
Quite an indictment—by a fellow Clinton appointee, no less—of Sotomayor’s unwillingness to give a fair shake to parties whose claims she evidently dislikes. Hardly the mark of a jurist worth serious consideration for the nation’s highest court.
n-a-t-i-o-n-a-l
r-e-v-i-e-w
'He Is Latino'
Why Dems borked Estrada, in their own words.
Don't worry, I don't think Republicans would stoop to such racist tactics.Saturday, November 15, 2003 12:01 A.M. EST
Now that the Senate has concluded its 30-hour talkathon on judicial filibusters, we thought readers might like to peer inside the filibustering Democratic mind, such as it is.
This plunge into the murky deep comes from staff strategy memos we've obtained from the days when Democrats ran the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2001-02. Or, rather, appeared to run the committee. Their real bosses are the liberal interest groups that more or less tell the Senators when to sit, speak and roll over--and which Bush judges to confirm or not. Here are some excerpts:
November 6, 2001/To: Senator Durbin
"You are scheduled to meet with leaders of several civil rights organizations to discuss their serious concerns with the judicial nomination process. The leaders will likely include: Ralph Neas (People For the American Way), Kate Michelman (NARAL), Nan Aron (Alliance for Justice), Wade Henderson (Leadership Conference on Civil Rights), Leslie Proll (NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund), Nancy Zirkin (American Association of University Women), Marcia Greenberger (National Women's Law Center), and Judy Lichtman (National Partnership). . . .
". . . The primary focus will be on identifying the most controversial and/or vulnerable judicial nominees. The groups would like to postpone action on these nominees until next year, when (presumably) the public will be more tolerant of partisan dissent."
November 7, 2001/To: Senator Durbin
"The groups singled out three--Jeffrey Sutton (6th Circuit); Priscilla Owen (5th Circuit); and Caroline [sic] Kuhl (9th Circuit)--as a potential nominee for a contentious hearing early next year, with a [sic] eye to voting him or her down in Committee. They also identified Miguel Estrada (D.C. Circuit) as especially dangerous, because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment. They want to hold Estrada off as long as possible."
February 28, 2002/To: SENATOR [Kennedy]
"Ralph Neas called to let us know that he had lunch with Andy Stern of SEIU. Andy wants to be helpful as we move forward on judges, and he has great contacts with Latino media outlets . . ."
April 17, 2002/To: SENATOR [Kennedy]
"Elaine Jones of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund tried to call you today. . . . Elaine would like the Committee to hold off on any 6th Circuit nominees until the University of Michigan case regarding the cons utionality of affirmative action in higher education is decided by the en banc 6th Circuit. . . . The thinking is that the current 6th Circuit will sustain the affirmative action program, but if a new judge with conservative views is confirmed before the case is decided, that new judge will be able, under 6th Circuit rules, to review the case and vote on it."
June 12, 2002/To: SENATOR (Kennedy)
"...Ultimately, if [Chairman Pat] Leahy insists on having an August hearing, it appears that the groups are willing to let [Timothy] Tymkovich [10th Circuit] go through (the core of the coalition made that decision last night, but they are checking with the gay rights groups)."
Mr. Tymkovich apparently got the gay OK.
But, in other news -- rumors abound that there may be up to 9 Democrats ready to vote no on Sotomayor...
Robert "Sheets" Byrd, paragon of racial equality, is among them.
SonOfDeepThroat
Only a rumor, mind you...but, heh, would that it be true... First, you have Democrats squabbling over whether or not the CIA lies and now, they'll be squabbling over whether or not "latinos" are allowed in the Supreme Court.
I can see Byrd now, "Goddamnit, I thought we decided no Latinos when we fought the Estrada nomination..."
The order and Judge Cabranes are quoted. The article contains the Court Record, you imbecile.
I didn't read anywhere that she was racist? Did I miss that?
Wall Street Journal opinion piece.. Let me go run and get a NY Times opinion piece to back my position...
Yes, you did. But, I did allow, the decision that clearly upheld a racist finding by the District Court (that the city could disallow an exam because not enough minorities would be promoted) could have been due to incompetence.I didn't read anywhere that she was racist? Did I miss that?
Wall Street Journal opinion piece.. Let me go run and get a NY Times opinion piece to back my position...
Please do. I think you'll find, as I did, that the New York Times opinion piece calls the Ricci case "Sotomayor's Mystery" case; and, is very vague on the substance of the case...much as Cabranes accused Sotomayor of being in her decision.Wall Street Journal opinion piece.. Let me go run and get a NY Times opinion piece to back my position...
I'm sorry, that was Slate. The New York Times Editorial opinion doesn't mention Ricci.
O.K. Yoni sit down I thought we went through this already..... Jerimiah Wright is not an anti-semetic racist asshole.Bill ayers is not a self admitted terrorist he's a kindigarten teacher.Rashid Khalidi was not a spokesman for the PLO,The sky isn't blue and bears don't in the woods. Wow a 20 year old disciple of Rev. Wright appoints a racist to the supreme court what a surprise.
The left just doesn't get it, or they do and they approve of a judge that will make bad ruling.
Within 12 hours we have all kinds of sound bite experts on her jurisprudence.
That's standard for the right and left.
So now we worry about "activist" interpretations of the Cons ution.
"She's unqualified!" screams a chorus that thought Harriet Miers would have made a fine Supreme Court justice.
Personally, I don't have an opinion on Sotomayor yet. I'll say, however, that I think the Slate blurb referenced above strikes me as a bit misleading about Sotomayor, if only because (from what I can tell), there's no indication that she was anything other than on the panel in that case. I don't take from the piece that Sotomayor was identified as the author of the opinion -- and so indicating would be strange because a per curiam opinion is generally an anonymous opinion for the entire panel -- and if she wasn't the actual author of the opinion, then attributing the procedural criticisms of that opinion to her would be inaccurate, I think.
Moreover, at worst, she's agreed with the majority of a court that split 7-6 in a case that is likely to divide the United States Supreme Court 5-4. It's not as if the conclusion that Judge Sotomayor ultimately voted for (regardless of who authored the underlying opinion) is obviously contrary to some settled standard of law -- at least it's not well-settled among some of the great legal minds in this country. In fact, as I just heard Walter Dellinger note, her conclusion is actually an act of judicial restraint insofar as it upholds the decision of a lower court, which upholds the decision of a local policy-making body.
Last edited by FromWayDowntown; 05-26-2009 at 11:46 PM.
Only liberally-oriented activism, though.
Conservative activism is always welcome.
That's what Rush said today on his show so that's why they are repeating it.
Republicans are looking stupid today by instantly opposing her nomination. She's clearly a of alot more qualified Harriet Myers so they ought to at least keep their mouth shut and learn more details about her judicial record before getting up in arms. Especially since this doesn't change the balance of the court.
I actually like her, but I'd definitely like to hear her explanation for her quote in California and for throwing that case out. Judges are going to make mistakes from time to time, or to have a point of view that might not be immediately obvious to those of us that don't know all the nuances of the case. I've only heard one side of that case so far, and it's the losing side, so naturally they're going to have a beef and be vocal. I can certainly understand how those two things taken at face value can be seen as racist if there's not something more to it as the details emerge. I wouldn't accept someone believing that their opinion was somehow more important than everyone else's simply because of their background, their gender or their race. I'd be damn frightened to have someone that thought that way applying the cons ution to legal issues for 400 million people.
As far as the "making policy" quote, it's not nearly as incendiary as one would think once you hear it. When an appeals court makes a decision, it sets a precedent and becomes policy. I think that's all she was saying. She knew it had the potential to be taken out of context when she said it, and she made a joke about it.
Well, for instance, I'm sure if blacks were on the court back in the day, they might have disagreed with Dred Scott. But I guess you'd call those blacks 'racist'.
Liberals care more about women and minorities.
As long as they're liberal women and minorities.
I would really like to see someone who hasn't made so many bad rulings.
How many cases has the supreme court reversed of hers, and President Obama wants to put here there?
This is absolutely ridiculous.
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