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jerwin wrote:

Empathy should influence a judge's decision. Therefore, there is a point to using it as a criterion for selecting a judge.

Your move, farmerkev.

Empathy has a role in sentencing, not in judging Constitutionality.
The SC's role is the latter.

Farmerkev wrote:

jerwin wrote:

Empathy should influence a judge's decision. Therefore, there is a point to using it as a criterion for selecting a judge.

Your move, farmerkev.

Empathy has a role in sentencing, not in judging Constitutionality.
The SC's role is the latter.

Sounds like a moderately advanced software application could be a Supreme Court Justice. No humanity required!

I like to think that the Constitution was founded on the idea of mutual distrust.

I like to think it was founded on compromising for the purposes accomplishing what needs to get done despite mutual distrust.

daemon wrote:

Sotomayor?

announcement 10:15am eastern

At 10:16am, the Party of No, formally known as the Republicans, will announce why the President’s choice is the Personification of All Evil.

They can't bitch. They want the Hispanic vote too bad and she's replacing Souter and not affecting the balance anyway.

However, at least on the question of choice, she has the requisite organs. Is she Catholic?

zeitgeist wrote:

user wrote:

They can't bitch. They want the Hispanic vote too bad and she's replacing Souter and not affecting the balance anyway.

However, at least on the question of choice, she has the requisite organs. Is she Catholic?

She is.

So much for diversity on the court.

The other great thing about this nomination is that many of the right wing attacks that will inevitably be made will have a subtle, or probably not subtle at all, race element to them (we're already hearing of the Rosen anonymous sourced one about Sotomayer being a moron on the bench) -- the end result will be further alienation of the Hispanic vote from Republicans.  You know, they just can't help themselves.

Advantage:  Obama

Noted at TPM:

If Sotomayor is confirmed, the Court would have six Roman Catholics, two Jews and one Protestant -- and that, the oldest, John Paul Stevens.

Scalia has denied that it has. I suppose that it comes up in Abortion cases. On a more abstract level, one could say that certain ethical systems are distinctly Catholic or distinctly Jewish in style.

Last edited by jerwin (2009-05-26 1:24 pm)

Tallgeese wrote:

Is there evidence that religious affiliation makes a difference for the justices' decisions?

That is to say, do the Catholics vote in a block and write similar decisions, the Jews vote together and write similar decisions, and when reading Stevens's decisions do you say "well, that was certainly written by a Protestant!"
?

Of course not.  I just found it interesting.

NokX wrote:

she's latino and a woman. it's historic and that's all i care about. everything else comes last.

You know, she's also an appeals court judge who was first nominated to be a U.S. district court judge by the first president Bush.

Says the ABA:

A political centrist, the Bronx-born Sotomayor has been re­garded as a potential high court nominee by several presidents, both Republican and Democrat. Reared by her widowed mother after the death of her father, a tool-and-die worker, she has an attractive life narrative and an even more attractive resumé.

She was an editor of the Yale Law Review, did heavy lifting as a prosecutor under legendary New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and worked in private practice as an intellectual property litigator.

She was first appointed to the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush, then to the appeals court by President Clinton. In 1995, she won the gratitude of baseball fans by issuing an injunction against team owners, setting the stage for the end of the eight-month strike that led to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.