Sotomayor and judicial activism

Sonia Sotomayor, the nominee for the Supreme Court has an impressive legal experience. She served as prosecutor for five years, worked in private law firms, and has been a federal judge for about 16 years. It is good, but not enough. It seems that in the debates over this nomination, the way she looks at the legal issues will be in the center of the debates. Race will be the biggest one.

NYTimes says she has been an activist during her study time in Princeton and Yale. She served as a member of a left-leaning Hispanic advocacy group. She also was in favor of racial diversity. In other words, instead of being race-neutral, she is race-conscious.

As a result of this tendency towards entering race in decisions, the issue of “judicial activism” will be in news and blogs everywhere. Wikipedia defines the judicial activism as follows: “Judicial activism is a philosophy advocating that judges should reach beyond the United States Constitution to achieve results that are consistent with contemporary conditions and values. Most often, it is associated with (modern) liberalism that believes in broad interpretation of the Constitution which can then be applied to specific issues.”

One more thing, ELS blog introduced a book that tends to measure activism in the Supreme Court. Measuring Judicial Activism, by Stefanie Lindquist and Frank Cross, (both at Uni. of Texas at Austin), has been published in 2009. Here is part of the description from description in AMAZON: “the concept of activism involves concerns over the judiciary’s institutional aggrandizement at the expense of the elected branches. An important corollary idea is that such efforts are particularly “activist” when they further the justices’ own policy or ideological objectives. From these core theoretical ideas, the authors identify specific empirical manifestations that reflect the expansion of judicial power. In particular, the authors evaluate the Court’s exercise of judicial review to invalidate legislative and executive action. Lindquist and Cross also analyze the justices’ willingness to expand the Court’s power by granting litigants increased access to the courts and overruling the Court’s own precedents. In these contexts, Measuring Judicial Activism considers the extent to which these actions are consistent with the justices’ ideological predilections.”