American Justice 2014. Garrett Epps
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Название: American Justice 2014
Автор: Garrett Epps
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Экономика
isbn: 9780812291308
isbn:
Republicans fought her confirmation in explicitly racial terms. During an academic event in 2001, Sotomayor had said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Before the hearings, Sotomayor said the comment was “a failed rhetorical flourish that fell flat.” Republicans claimed it showed racial bias against whites. They also criticized her work with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and a decision she had made on the Second Circuit upholding a city government’s decision to discard the results of a promotion test that would have produced an all-white pool. (The case was criticized even by her Puerto Rican mentor, Second Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes, and later overturned by the Supreme Court.) But in the end, these qualms could not overcome the power of her life story, and the Senate confirmed the first Latina justice on August 6, 2009.
On the bench, Sotomayor soon eclipsed even Scalia as the court’s most aggressive questioner. On some occasions, the chief justice or other justices would ask her to be quiet and allow a lawyer to respond. In her opinions, she was moderate to liberal, with some skepticism of local law enforcement; her opinions were somewhat long-winded and technical. She seemed on her way to establishing herself as a “judge’s judge,” a devotee of the inside language of jurisdiction and precedent. Off the bench, she embraced becoming a wider role model, particularly for young Latina women. Her memoir, My Beloved World, appeared in early 2013 and became a best seller. It is a vivid portrait of the impoverished but vital family and neighborhood that nourished her and of the struggles that took her to the bench. Its sales made her, for the first time in her life, moderately well-to-do. (She is by far the poorest justice.)
But there was one more distinction, which she earned five months later. Until April 22, 2014, Sotomayor had not read a dissent from the bench in the Supreme Court chamber. In her first four years on the bench, she had authored twenty-one dissents. In March 2014 she had even told former New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse that she didn’t think much of dissents from the bench. “Announcing it from the bench,” she said to Greenhouse in a public conversation at Yale Law School, “is like entertainment for the press.”
Less than a month later, she reversed course in a case she clearly felt deeply about. No opinion she had written to date would gain more attention than the one she read in a case called Schuette v. Coalition to Preserve and Defend Affirmative Action.
Schuette arose out of the ongoing bitter battle against race-conscious affirmative action in college and university admissions. Many people believe that any use of race in the admissions process—even to open up institutions that were, until a generation or two ago, all white—disadvantages white people (and some other groups, like Asian Americans), stigmatizes nonwhites who “benefit” from it, and violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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