JUNE 4, 2009
Sotomayor's Talk Made No Waves in '01
By NAFTALI BENDAVID
WSJ
WASHINGTON -- For an event that has emerged as one of the biggest issues in the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice, the speech Judge Sonia Sotomayor delivered in 2001 generated little notice at the time from the audience at a symposium on Latinos and the law. Ms. Sotomayor's comment that she hoped a "wise Latina" would usually reach a better judicial conclusion than a white male has prompted cries of racism from her detractors and calls from Republican senators for an explanation. To critics like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), Ms. Sotomayor was clearly saying that members of one ethnic group make better judges than those of another. The remark didn't strike those in attendance as provocative. "I don't remember those words, though I was there for the whole speech," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. "My impression, and that of many others, was that it was a very straightforward talk."
On Wednesday, it emerged that Judge Sotomayor's 2001 speech closely mirrored one she gave seven years earlier at a panel on women in the judiciary. The 1994 speech contained a version of the controversial sentence, except she referred to women generally -- not just Latinas -- and elaborated that "better will mean a more compassionate and caring conclusion." The 2001 address, delivered at an auditorium in Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, was part of a symposium called "Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation." About 100 Hispanic lawyers and law students attended. "I don't think anybody thought it was incendiary or inflammatory or anything like that," said Rachel Moran, then a Berkeley law professor. Ms. Moran, who is Hispanic, invited Judge Sotomayor, whom she had known at Yale Law School.
Chris Arriola, a deputy district attorney in Santa Clara County, Calif., agreed. "I took it as she was using an opposite to make a point," said Mr. Arriola, an active supporter of the Sotomayor nomination. "She was trying, as I understood it, to dispel the myth that somehow minority judges were the 'other' with an inability to be fair." The underrepresentation of Hispanics on the bench has been a continuing topic of conversation among Latino attorneys, but it was drawing particular attention at the time. The new president, George W. Bush, was thought to be receptive to naming Hispanics, and activists were seeking strategies for persuading him to do so.
(snip)
Repeating points from her 1994 speech, she noted that some great justices, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, had voted to uphold sex and race discrimination. She also observed that white men had rendered some great decisions, like Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which outlawed school segregation in the U.S. Ultimately, she said she owed the parties in court "constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives." Last week, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and radio host Rush Limbaugh called Ms. Sotomayor "racist," though Mr. Gingrich backed off that characterization on Wednesday. "My initial reaction was strong and direct -- perhaps too strong and too direct," he said in a statement. "The word 'racist' should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person, even if her words themselves are unacceptable."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124404932521081845.html (subscription)
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A4
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