Sotomayor in Senate

Senate judicial committee is hearing Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion on judicial decision makings. She seems to be very well prepared to pass this stage. What is interesting is the Republican’s strategy. They know, and they have explicitly said, that she will get the confirmation. But as this paper in NYTimes suggests, Republicans set the stage for future moves. They pushed her to explicitly say that she is NOT in favor of a living constitution, as liberals believe.

“By forcing Judge Sotomayor to retreat from Mr. Obama’s desire for justices with “empathy,” Republicans have effectively set a new standard that future nominees will be pressed to meet. The Republicans hope their aggressive questioning of Judge Sotomayor on race discrimination, gun control and the death penalty will make it harder for Mr. Obama to choose a more outspoken liberal in the future.”

Supreme Court on Child Strip Search

The US Supreme Court ruled, in an 8-1 decision, that strip search of a 13-years-old girl in a school in Arizona was a violation of her Constitutional rights. Read the story in NYTimes. There is also a link to the decision.

What is intersting is the saying couted from Justice Ginsburg:

““They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” Justice Ginsburg said. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I don’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.””

It reminds me of  judicial activism. Does the above statement mean that a wise old man and a wise old woman would NOT reach the same conclusion when deciding cases (story here)

Justice Thomas wrote dissenting opinion. He believes that: “Preservation of order, discipline and safety in public schools is simply not the domain of the Constitution”

Brooks on Sotomayor

David Brooks wrote on Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor in NYTimes. He tries to convince the reader that Sonia’s records do not show any tendency towards decision making based on race. Here is what I liked in his note:
“Tom Goldstein of Scotusblog conducted a much-cited study of the 96 race-related cases that have come before her. Like almost all judges, she has rejected a vast majority of the claims of racial discrimination that came to her. She dissented from her colleagues in only four of those cases. And in only one of them did she find racial discrimination where they did not. Even with what she calls her “Latina soul,” she saw almost every case pretty much as they did.”

Elected Judges and the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that elected judges should step aside from cases where their large campaign contributors are involved. This rule came from a case in West Virginia where a company contributed about $3 million in the campaign for the state Supreme Court Justice. Now this justice is involved in a case of the same company with $82.7 million in stake.

As theory says, and commentators believe, the biggest problem with judicial election is the possibility of tilting the rules in favor of the campaign contributors. Elections were designed to cut the hands of politicians from the judicial offices, but it seems that the need for campaign money threatens this goal. These days the money spent on judicial campaigns are huge. This makes judges sort of accountable to contributors.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in this case. Four liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens joined the swing voter, Justice Anthony Kennedy who wrote for the Court. Chief Justice John Roberts dissented and conservative justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined him.

Read the story in NYTimes.

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.”

Nominee for the Supreme Court

President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to replace Justice David Souter in the Supreme Court. She went to a Catholic School and then got into Princeton University. She got her law degree from Yale Law School where she served as editor of the Yale Law Journal. She then worked in the district attorney office in New York for Robert Morgenthau, and tried private practice. In 1991, the first President Bush elected her (selected by senate a year later) for the federal district court. President Clinton selected her for the court of appeal in 1997. She is from a Puerto Rican family, lost her father when 9 years old, raised in Bronx public housing projects to become the nation’s first Hispanic justice. For more on this see NYTimes today. I’ll try to read on this and post more.