Sonia Sotomayor’s IQ
Sonia Sotomayor seems in many ways like exactly the sort of person Barack Obama would appoint to the Supreme Court. She was born to a working class Puerto Rican family in the South Bronx, and went from Cardinal Spelling High School to Princeton and Yale Law. She worked as an Assistant District Attorney and then went into private practice. George H.W. Bush nominated her for a seat on the Federal District Court, and Bill Clinton elevated her to a Circuit Court. In other words, she’s well-qualified, her work has managed to gain the respect of Republicans, and she’s had a more interesting range of life experiences than your typical Yale Law graduate.
That said, it is the case that the one person I ever seriously discussed this issue with expressed to me the view that Sotomayor doesn’t have the “intellectual firepower” of some other possible nominees and that it would be nice to see someone more impressively brilliant. This isn’t something I’ve written about up until now because:
- I’ve never spoken to Judge Sotomayor.
- I haven’t studied Judge Sotomayor’s opinions.
- You don’t see a lot of dumb kids growing up in the South Bronx and winding up at Princeton.
- So it struck me as wrong to run with an anonymous disparaging remark in the absence of actual evidence.
But apparently Jeffrey Rosen doesn’t roll that way, since he has a piece in The New Republic featuring various unnamed people making exactly this argument. I’d say the money quote comes in the final graf of the piece:
I haven’t read enough of Sotomayor’s opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor’s detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths.
Really it seems to me that when you see a person who appears to be qualified in all the normal ways, you owe that person a presumption that she’s up to the job. I recall a lot of issues being raised during the Samuel Alito confirmation fight, but at that time I don’t remember anyone raising questions about the intelligence of a Princeton/Yale Law graduate who’d done time on an Appeals Court. Maybe we should make the two of them both take IQ tests or something?
140 Responses to “Sonia Sotomayor’s IQ”
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May 4th, 2009 at 10:57 am
If you miss Steve Sailer, just say so.
May 4th, 2009 at 10:57 am
The playbook is pretty clear on this one. Tag her as the minority who’s not intellectually qualified to further enrage the base.
But unlike you I think administering aptitude tests isn’t such a bad idea. Although I think we would need to start with the sitting 9 justices to get some kind of baseline. And we should let the case of whether or not the justices have to take the tests be decided by them. I’m guessing the decision would be at worst 6-3 against.
It’s worth noting the people who will further this meme aren’t really serious about intellectual curiosity or aptitude. Their interested in furthering a meme of minorities as unqualified or needing of assistance. This coming from the party who thought it wise to compare Sarah Palin with Barack Obama with a straight face mind you.
I would be in favor of all statewide officials and congress members taking aptitude tests with scores available for all. This would severly tamper the egos, arrogance and bluster on both sides of the aisle.
May 4th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Truly bizarre. It blows my mind that anyone thinks someone who is not intelligent could graduate from Yale Law.
It does however, seem, that Rosen’s article focuses as much on Sotomayor’s overbearing demeanor as it does her raw intelligence. This criticism seems completely reasonable (assuming it’s accurate).
May 4th, 2009 at 10:59 am
I would be in favor of all statewide officials and congress members taking aptitude tests with scores available for all.
This would be so deliciously wonderful I can’t believe I’ve never heard the idea before. Yes please!
May 4th, 2009 at 11:00 am
You should expect this kind of stuff. Righties believe that anyone like Sotomayor only achieved success because of affirmative action. Therefore, she was less intelligent and stole a slots at Princeton and Yale from a deserving white Christian student.
Just a matter of time before they claim her birth certificate is a fraud.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Yale law graduates hundreds of people every year, the vast majority of whom do not become Supreme Court justices. I’m sure she’s very intelligent- one doesn’t graduate Yale law without being intelligent. However, the fact is that Sotomayor is not perceived as one of the preeminent members of the 2nd Circuit, other judges on that court (like the brilliant chief judge Dennis Jacobs) are better judges and are not being considered. Sotomayor is. Call it “life experiences” or “wanting to have a hispanic woman on the Court”, but there are reasons other than brilliance for her appearance on the short list.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Truly bizarre. It blows my mind that anyone thinks someone who is not intelligent could graduate from Yale Law.
Just remember, Glenn Reynolds graduated from Yale law. “You don’t see a lot of dumb kids growing up in the South Bronx and winding up at Princeton” seems more relevant.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Seems to me that Matt and Rosen should do their homework and actually read her opinions before they rush to publish insinuations that she’s dumb.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:07 am
Some liberals want a liberal Scalia which is asinine. The last thing we need is another preening cultural warrior on the bench poisoning up the atmosphere. Sonia Sotomayor is experienced, capable, and competent which becomes all the more impressive given her background. She seems like a splendid candidate.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:08 am
John Yoo is also a Yale law graduate. Doesn’t give confidence in its product.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:10 am
To what extent is there really an objective measure of legal brilliance? Won’t most people tend to find legal opinions they agree with to be “brilliant” and those they disagree with to be poorly reasoned?
May 4th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Clarence Thomas. Yale Law School. Court of Appeals.
You might want to think of an argument that liberals can make without blushing.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:12 am
I’m almost certain that Obama will nominate the most easily confirmable liberal-to-moderate woman, whether it’s Sotomayor or Kagan or someone else. His comments and past practices indicate a desire to avoid a fight when possible and take an easy 50% win over a hard 100%.
Political realities and simple decency require him to put a second woman on the court. But after that consideration, he’s going for the easy win. And of course everyone wants a liberal Scalia to astonish us all with brilliance, but anyone who sits on a federal court (and most state supreme courts) is going to have the necessary intellectual tools to do the work, especially when assisted by a steady pipeline of Ivy League law clerks.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Jacobs is 65 years old and was appointed by George Bush I. I think that explains it.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:17 am
GW Bush has a MBA from Harvard and he’s still an idiot.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:17 am
On one hand, there tends to be a unfair snobbish presumption that things like an extreme work ethic combined with ambition “doesn’t count” when evaluating one’s intelligence which Sotomayor might be getting hit with.
On the other hand, you have people like Glenn Reynolds who appears to have an active disdain for the process of thinking, so the possibility that such people might not actually have a lot of intellectual firepower is entirely possible.
What MattY is getting at, and a lot of you commenters are ignoring, is that in all cases we generally ascribe to a presumption of intelligence with people of that background, and if you’re going to point out their intellectual shortcomings you’d better have a bunch of specific documentation to back up the claim, none of which Sotomayor’s anonymous detractors seem to have bothered to provide.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:18 am
“Legal brilliance” should be a disqualification.
It means a person is good at making plausible-sounding arguments for preposterous positions. This is a good quality for an attorney representing clients, but it can be a very dangerous quality for a judge.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:21 am
GW Bush has a MBA from Harvard and he’s still an idiot.
According to most econ depts, that there’s a feature, not a bug. O:)
May 4th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Before going too crazy with this, it should be noted that a person could be way smarter than average, and also less smart then some other leading contenders for the Supreme Court.
But of course raw intelligence isn’t the issue anyway. Personally, I would be looking for a strategic thinker, a person who sees how the way in which an opinion is written in one case sets up the disposition of future cases. Indeed, Roberts is such a thinker, and I think Obama would be wise to balance him with someone similar.
Since I don’t have much familiarity with Sotomayor’s work, I won’t offer an opinion on whether she is such a judge. But I do think that would be the relevent consideration in this area.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Isn’t “brilliant” a term usually applied to men, because it also implies a kind of Asperger-esque obsessiveness that’s associated with men over women?
May 4th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Man, the “lacks intellectual firepower” claim is just conservative code for “decides cases in ways I disagree with.” They say the same thing about Earl Warren and William Brennan. Meanwhile, Antonin Scalia is held up as the greatest judicial mind since Oliver Wendell Holmes.
It’s the same “capturing the media” strategy as, say, blaming the current depression on the Community Reinvestment Act, or that cutting taxes creates magical revenue. Make an authoritative statement implying you have some deep, obscure, albeit counter-intuitive knowledge and CNN will usually report it as Fact.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Political realities and simple decency require him to put a second woman on the court. But after that consideration, he’s going for the easy win
Maybe, although being the hyperpolitical bitch that I am, I can’t help but relish the delicious possibilities of reducing the GOP’s share of the Latino vote even further thanks to a ham-handed right wing attack on a gifted and eminently qualified Latina SC nominee. Obama’s too responsible a president to make a nomination for ulterior, political motives, but if the good guys can get some more votes in the bargain, why not? (side note: anybody know if this woman is Catholic? That would make for a mightily papist supreme court. While I personally wouldn’t have a problem with yet another co-religionist of mine on the hight court, I could see yet more temptation for conservative overreach on this score, as well. Here’s hoping for a broad-based attack on Latinos, women, and Catholics, courtesy of James Dobson and his friends in the Senate!).
May 4th, 2009 at 11:39 am
I’m sorry, but Matt’s approach to this issue seems kneejerk, ugly and off the mark. The comments in the TNR piece purport to be from people who have actually observed Sotomayor’s questioning in action and have read her opinions. The opinion of those people is that she might notbe intellectually or temperamentally up to snuff.
Maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong. Or maybe Matt has some positive reason to doubt their credibility. If she is nominated, that is one thing that will be measured during the confirmation process. But such testimony from people who have observed her in action is surely something that might legitimately be taken into account.
By the way, it is Matt who injected the issue that their intellectual appraisal has something to do with assessments of Sotomayor’s “IQ”. It doesn’t. Not everyone with a high IQ is intellectually accomplished. Similarly, not everyone with superior intellectual accomplishments has a high IQ. In the same way, if a literary critic said some poet’s work showed a limited range of imagination, we wouldn’t leap to the conclusion that they are judging that poet’s native endowments or “imagination quotient”.
Really it seems to me that when you see a person who appears to be qualified in all the normal ways, you owe that person a presumption that she’s up to the job.
This is perplexing. What are “all the normal ways”? When we’re talking about potential supreme court justices, aren’t intellectual accomplishment and judicial temperament some of the normal ways we assess qualifications? My rule would be that when we are talking about Supreme Court justices, the presumption is that very few individuals are suitable.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Eh, Scalia made Supreme Court Catholicism safe for conservatives years ago. Dobson’s out there thinking he’s fighting the Crusades, remember? Still, I do look forward to this re-triggering all that “OMG RECONQUISTA!!!!1″ BS.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:40 am
Didn’t Clarence Thomas go to Yale Law School? That pretty much devastates your argument here.
Also, Bush went to Harvard and Yale. I don’t see why it is so shocking that some people might think that just because you went to an Ivy League school that you might actually be a moron. I realize other Ivy Leaguers find that hard to swallow.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:46 am
“Clarence Thomas. Yale Law School. Court of Appeals. You might want to think of an argument that liberals can make without blushing.”
He doesn’t bluster like Scalia, he has a tendency to keep his yap shut in oral arguments, he’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of China and he’s ideologically wrong-headed… but he’s predictable, clear, and consistent. In my book he’s far more worthy of respect as a Judge than the other conservatives on the Court. He’s not the brightest bulb on the Court, but he’s pretty clearly not the dullest one either. *Cough* Alito *Cough*
May 4th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Sotomayor didn’t just go to Princeton, she graduated summa cum laude, which is not too shabby.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:48 am
I recall a lot of issues being raised during the Samuel Alito confirmation fight, but at that time I don’t remember anyone raising questions about the intelligence of a Princeton/Yale Law graduate who’d done time on a Appeals Court.
Alito: Clerked for the Third Circuit and interviewed for a Supreme Court clerkship with Justice White. Spent his post-clerkship years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and then with the Solicitor General’s office.
Sotomayor: Didn’t clerk. Worked for the NY District Attorney out of law school. No federal experience prior to appointment to the bench.
I opposed Alito’s nomination, and I’m ambivalent as to whether Sotomayor would make a good Justice. But the idea that her post-YLS qualifications were even remotely as impressive as Alito’s is utter nonsense.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:49 am
In my book he’s far more worthy of respect as a Judge than the other conservatives on the Court.
I’ll just add that Thomas has an excellent reputation as a judicial craftsman and “writer.” (Though admittedly, how much of that is him and how much is his normally impressive cast of clerks is unknowable.)
May 4th, 2009 at 11:53 am
“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
Kurt Vonnegut
There may be a number of qualities worthy of discussion, but this isn’t one them. If the last eight years hasn’t made the argument against the predictive value of intellectual firepower, it can’t be made. When delivering justice within the boundaries of the constitution requires real mental gymnastics, it’s time to amend the constitution.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:55 am
We are treading in rarefied air here, and making subjective judgments of whether she is among the absolute brightest of all candidates with the basic qualifications for the job seems perfectly reasonable to me. If there happens to be a Woman who is among the absolute brightest, and she shares your basic approach to deciding constitutional matters and strategic judgeship as DTM suggests, then please select her. If not, then choose a Man. Barack Obama is an elite intellectual, in addition to being a politician. He is going to pick the smartest liberal judge or constitutional expert in the country. Period. He will ignore identity politics, in my opinion, and since there are women who are among the very best, he will ultimately select one.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Alberto Gonzales went to Harvard Law School, which is a lot larger than Yale, but still.
I don’t know anything about Sotomayor either, now I’m going to seek out her opinions to make up my mind, but I feel compelled to state that Jeffrey Rosen is probably overstating the extent to which raw IQ results in good legal reasoning. Scalia is supposedly brilliant, but outside of a few areas, his opinions read like screeds and diatribes devoid of persuasive reasoning. I am convinced that this stems, in part, from the fact that he has always been the smartest guy in the room, convinced he is right and impervious to the arguments of others.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I work in a small law firm with a niche practice in a complex field of civil law. Just the other day we were laughing because someone mentioned that Rush Limbaugh had said that Sotomayer “wasn’t the brightest judges in the country.” Our reaction was, “Really? Are you sure? She is certainly on the short list.”
We read a lot of circuit court opinions in our practice, and we rated her opinions as consistently top-notch. They certainly outpace by a wide margin the stuff Justice Kennedy wrote before he was elevated to the Supreme Court.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Reading the comments on Rosens’ article indicates a substantial division of opinion of lawyers who claimed to have tried cases before her. Some consider her a fine judge, others mediocre. On the other hand, she can’t be worse then Clarence Thomas.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I’ll just add that Thomas has an excellent reputation as a judicial craftsman and “writer.”
Eh. I thought Thomas’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas was pretty witty until I realized he had cribbed off of Potter Stewart’s dissent in Griswold.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Could someone give just a couple of examples of Scalia’s reputed brilliance? He’s frequently described in the press as brilliant. But on the few occasions in which examples are given, arrogance, impatience and acerbity cloak pedestrian thinking.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
If the last eight years hasn’t made the argument against the predictive value of intellectual firepower, it can’t be made.
How do the last eight years make that argument? Do you think the Bush administration is characterized by intellectual firepower gone bad? Of course, you are right that intellectual firepower alone is never enough. But it’s not as though we had much of a test of that principle in action during the Bush years.
When delivering justice within the boundaries of the constitution requires real mental gymnastics, it’s time to amend the constitution.
Why? An advanced and complex society governed by the rule of law is going to have sophisticated and complex laws, and the application of those laws in the most fitting way to complex and rapidly changing institutions will be no easy matter.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
First of all, Jeffrey Rosen, whether or not he has acted responsibly in this particular article, is by no means somebody speaking in conservative code. I see in Rosen’s article the same dissatisfaction that I feel in the current liberal branch of the Supreme Court, that we have many justices like Ginsberg and Stevens who vote in the liberal way (or rather in the way that has become liberal now that the court has moved far to the right), but speak with a small judicial voice of moderation and narrow decisions. Ginsberg has, I think, been trying to write with a judicial voice that is bigger and more dramatic recently in trying to call attention to the degree of rightward drift on the court, but it’s not her natural voice and when she tries to do that, she’s no Scalia.
The ability to write judicial opinions in a big picture way that is dramatic, clear and yes brilliant, is a rare gift. It is not something that can be assumed of everyone who makes it to the position of being a candidate for SCOTUS, and it is something we haven’t had on the left wing of the Supreme Court since Brennan and Marshall. In fact, I’d say there are only a dozen or so powerful judicial voices, who really laid out a perspective and changed legal discourse, in SCOTUS history: Marshall, OWH, Brandeis, maybe Cardozo, Frankfurter, maybe Warren, Brennan, the other Marshall, and Scalia. It is no insult to Sotomayer to ask whether she has what it takes to be a great justice such as that prestigious list. It is most certainly not the same thing as calling her stupid. And whether or not a candidate can become the next Scalia or OWH is absolutely the qusetion that Obama should be asking, a much more important qusetion than gender or ethnicity.
Basically, I agree it would be a better article if Rosen had done more research on her judicial opinions, but that’s a hard slog and doesn’t lend itself to the instant feedback cycle of the blogosphere. But I think it is essential that somebody raise the qusetion he raised, and it should be taken seriously, not defensively. We’re talking about an appointment that could affect the next 30 years of the court, at least. Lets not call any part of a canidate’s credentials out of bounds.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Let me put it this way. In my view Cabranes has the intellectual firepower of a Stevens, Breyer or Souter (I personally think Scalia a low wattage in the intellect department.)
Sotomayor does not have that.
I base my view on the opinion she has signed.
I do not know Judge Sotomayor.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
We read a lot of circuit court opinions in our practice, and we rated her opinions as consistently top-notch. They certainly outpace by a wide margin the stuff Justice Kennedy wrote before he was elevated to the Supreme Court.
Here you go, Matt: a contrary assessment from people with relevant experience. Sure beats a kneejerk dismissal.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
That article was a hatchet job and Rosen should be ashamed to have published it, especially having admitted that he a) hadn’t read enough of her work to form his own opinion and b) hadn’t spoken to enough people. Based on that admission alone, it’s premature and given that it is filled with anonymous,highly subjective attacks from people whose credibility he offers the shield of anonymity to, Rosen’s piece is disgraceful. When you add to it that a great deal of the assessments of inadequate intelligence and “bullying”/failure to shut up and let other, wiser heads speak reek of familiar calumnies used historically to attack women and minorities in positions of power, color me skeptical. Judge Sotomayor may actually be all this article accuses her of, but I think Rosen fails to present the evidence and in fact, I read it more as his using a historical and corrupted template to carry water for a right-wing Republican attack…even the liberal TNR.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
This is for the SCOTUS. This spot should be for a top legal mind. I am sure she has to have an IQ in the top 5% of people to get where she was. She is almost assuredly intelligent. GWB probabaly has an IQ in the top 5-10% also. He isn’t an idiot as the average person goes, he just was way over his head. He had all the aptitude for middle management. I know nothing about this lady but whoever is chosen, I hope they are intelligent with real world experience. The justices are sittingo on the courts for decades and the potential for influencing so many things is immense. Abortion, drug policy, role of religion in our country are but a few.
Clarance Thomas is the obvious example of someone with a good resume who doesn’t have the horsepower for the high court. He isn’t a stupid person, he is just over his head. He also seems to lack self awareness, much like GWB himself.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I noticed shermaclay’s comment on Kennedy and I actually think Kennedy seems a fair comparison to Sotomayor. I think they are in the same class as intellects.
Both below Souter, Stevens and Breyer. It is hard to guage Justice Ginsburg in my view since she seems to have been suffering so much physically.
Sotomayor would be a perfectly adequate Justice.
Cabranes could be something special. Kagan could be something special.
I need to read more on the other names being bandied about.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Re: side note: anybody know if this woman is Catholic? That would make for a mightily papist supreme court.
If she shows deference to the abominable legacy of the unspeakable Harry Blackmun, she may become an excommunicate Catholic. And quite rightly, I may add.
Ms. Sotomayor is undoubtedly a woman of high intellectual achievement, but the question is whether she will use those considerable talents for morally good purposes or not.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
While we are trading in gossip here, I would note that I am an attorney in civil practice in NYC and I have heard a number of people express the opinion that Judge Sotomayor is not a great judge. That may, of course, mean that she’s not a great judge for civil defendants — she’s wishy washy on applying clear contracts, etc. — but that’s not a value free opinion. I think it’s difficult to argue that she’s not qualified for the Supreme Court. And discussions about “most qualified” are a little ridiculous because there is no objective standard and, if there were, it’s doubtful that most justices could claim to have been the “most qualified” when they were appointed.
In all events, I have met Judge Sotomayor, and she is erudite, witty and a generally nice person.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
That’s basically how I feel, with the additional note that I’m certain that Koh would be something special. Although I’m pretty sure about Kagan as well, so I’d be satisfied with her.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
and a generally nice person
Ugh. I meant genuinely nice person.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Ms. Sotomayor is undoubtedly a woman of high intellectual achievement, but the question is whether she will use those considerable talents for morally good purposes or not.
Hector, nobody a Democrat picks is going to overturn Roe v. Wade, which we all know is what you mean by “morally good purposes”. So you may as well start hating her and/or whoever else Obama picks now.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Matt you could make the exact same defense of Clarence Thomas. The question is would you? Thomas Graduated in the middle of his class from Yale Law. Is that on it’s own enough to be qualified for the highest court in the country? Roberts graduated magna cum Laude from harvard law so did Salia, Ginsburg was first in her class at Columbia alito went to yale I don’t know about his class rank and I don’t know about Sotomayor’s class rank.
Frankly I think cognitive muscle is overrated in a jurist. As nice as it would be to think that there’s a right answer that you get by virtue of being smart enough it obviously doesn’t work that way. There’s an answer you get by knowing stuff that many smart people know and by being brilliant gives the answer that you got for reasons that have little to do with intellect credibility.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
I see in Rosen’s article the same dissatisfaction that I feel in the current liberal branch of the Supreme Court, that we have many justices like Ginsberg and Stevens who vote in the liberal way (or rather in the way that has become liberal now that the court has moved far to the right), but speak with a small judicial voice of moderation and narrow decisions.
That’s making more a statement about intellectual temperament rather than their “firepower,” and if that’s the point under discussion, then we will be having a different argument. The nature of liberalism over the past 20-30 years has meant that the liberal intellectuals, as smart as they might be, have been defensively working around at the margins rather than making the sweeping liberal declarations. There’s a case to be made that we want a new generation of Democratic judicial appointees, but that’s not to say anyone who is different than that is intellectually mediocre.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Especially when they’re anonymous. Because nothing shouts legitimacy quite like unsourced sniping.
No.
I mean, come on, someone in this thread has noted how much more impressive a career Alito has had, without paying any attention to the substance of his judicial opinions. And currently, the Senate works the same way. Or it did when Republicans ran the show, and it was beyond the pale to ask questions about any ideas about the law whatsoever, because a case having to do with laws might one day come before the Court. Of course, I expect Republican Judiciary members to abandon this dearly-held belief and accuse Obama’s nominee over all those cases he or she decided in an “activist” way. Hmm, perhaps the primary criterion for the appointment should be someone whose spouse puts on a good act of crying because of the “meanies.”
May 4th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
To back up Dan Kervick on the complexity of being a good judge, here is Alexander Hamiltion (in Federalist #78):
And it hasn’t gotten any simpler since his time.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Alito was quite a pedestrian judge imo, to put it charitably.
Sotomayor is certainly at least his equal, more likely superior to him.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Could someone give just a couple of examples of Scalia’s reputed brilliance?
I’d go deeper: could someone give an example of “brilliant jurisprudence”? How do you know it when you see it?
May 4th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
I read a lot of Alito opinions during his nomination. He wrote solid if not exactly poetic opinions, but what really leapt out to me was that he was highly deferential to the government, particularly in criminal/police cases. Which, I assume, is why he was picked.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Adam,
Very good. It’s nice to know that the one issue that Obama and his cronies will go to the wall for, is the right to legalized butchery. In this, I suppose, they are not too different from the late and unlamented General Robert E. Lee, who was willing to risk his life for the right to enslave and abuse other men.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Disagree strongly with Matt and amok. “You don’t see a lot of dumb kids growing up in the South Bronx and winding up at Princeton” is a silly statement to make in this context.
That’s like saying that a basketball player who played for North Carolina and then for the Chicago Bulls “must be good because he played for North Carolina.” Making the NBA is a cut above college basketball, even if you played for an elite college program.
Similarly, the law school admissions game is played at a much higher level of competition than undergraduate admissions game is. Yes, you will be able to find a certain percentage of Yale Law school whom you consider idiots. If you were honest about applying the same standards to Princeton undegraduates, however, the percentage you call idiots would be much higher there.
What’s really going on here is that Matt went to Harvard but no grad school. It suits him to promote the indefensible claim that the prestige of your college says more about your intelligence than the prestige of your graduate school.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Didn’t Bush graduate from Yale and Harvard?
May 4th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Fair enough. I guess I’m not that confident in our ability to identify a candidate’s suitability for the very unique world of Supreme Court jurisprudence on a neutral, a priori basis. Certainly there are outer limits of acceptability — the Harriet Miers of the world, for example. But here you have an experienced, sitting Federal judge whose anonymous detractors are making fairly fuzzy claims about “intellectual firepower” — it’s not obvious to me that those claims necessarily deserve credence.
I certainly don’t think it comes down to the “prestige” of the resume as one of the earlier commenters argued, particularly if you take Obama’s intention to appoint someone familiar with traditionally excluded groups seriously. It’s certainly true that a judge who learned her trade in the New York DA’s office is going to have a very different set of cultural and ideological assumptions and experience than a possible Supreme Court clerk who went straight to the AUSA’s office. But that diversity of experience may actually be exactly what Obama wants.
Finally, I also want to point out that Obama’s opinion about her intellectual capacity deserves some deference here. Barack Obama is not George W. Bush. I mean this is one of the few moments in American history (perhaps the first?) in which a genuine legal scholar gets to make a Supreme Court appointment — presumably he will not waste it on someone he feels is intellectually unqualified.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
There is room- perhaps even need- on the court for someone who is not an intellectual jaugernaut, just “very smart” and more importantly very savvy. Look at Earl Warren, or even Sandy O’Connor.
Of course, Rosen’s article seems to argue that she does not have such a temperament, but I’m not sure how far we can trust an article full of unnamed sources sharing VERY subjective opinions.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Re Hector
As I have made clear on this blog and others, I consider that Robert E. Lee was one of the most overrated generals in the history of warfare. Having said that, Mr. Hectors’ comment is not entirely fair. Although Lee owned slaves, he was a supporter of gradual emancipation, having concluded that slavery was a system that had to be phased out. His decision to resign his commission in the US Army was based on his loyalty to his home state, Virginia, not on defending slavery. At the time of the Civil War, the concept of loyalty to the central government was not nearly as pervasive as it is today. Later in the war, he proposed to President Jefferson Davis that slaves be offered freedom in return for service in the Confederate Army, a proposal that the latter summarily rejected.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Do people have reading comprehension problems? Matt’s simply suggesting if you have not studied her opinions or communicated with people who know her, then you all you really have to judge her by is her resume, which is certainly impressive enough on its surface. The resume alone certainly isn’t enough to warrant a SCOTUS seat, but it’s pretty presumptuous and stupid to speculate about her intelligence and qualifiactions if you haven’t given any reason to question them- which is what Jeffery Rosen did.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
That’s Cardinal Spellman High School.
I realize he may have been a bit before your time, but Francis Cardinal Spellman was arguably the most influential American Catholic prelate of the 20th century. Yeah, Bishop Fulton Sheen was on the teevee and beat Milton Berle in the ratings when Berle was Mr. Television, but Spellman had an in with the Pope; he was a life-long friend of Pius XII.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
“That pretty much devastates your argument here. ”
Not in the slightest- Matt only mentioned a PRESUMPTION, and a presumption can be rebutted. Thomas, in many’s views, rebutted that presumption during his tenure on the Court. Bush did so when he opened his mouth.
Doesn’t seem like Sotomayor has yet, given that the only real attacks are from unnamed sources voicing fairly subjective opinions.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Hector is different, because he’s willing to comment on blogs for the right to enslave and abuse women.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
[...] #5: Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic has the case against Sotomayor. Matt Y. dissents from [...]
May 4th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Somebody mentioned Cabranes above as though it were self-evident that he’s some kind of genius. Nuh-uh. He’s the pompous moron who wrote the Second Circuit’s opinion ruling against Maher Arar’s civil suit against (various officers of ) the US government for sending him to Syria to be tortured. Nobody should be remotely seriously considering Cabranes for SCOTUS.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
He’s frequently described in the press as brilliant. But on the few occasions in which examples are given, arrogance, impatience and acerbity cloak pedestrian thinking.
Again, “brilliant” is often a euphemism for “borderline personality”.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
>> “Not in the slightest- Matt only mentioned a PRESUMPTION, and a presumption can be rebutted.”
The point is that the PRESUMPTION is unwarranted, as Thomas, Bush, and others prove. That doesn’t mean one should presume that she is unqualified, either, before examining her record. Matt is arguing that you should presume someone to be qualified (in terms of intelligence, etc.) on the basis of her resume before examining her record. I’d argue both presumptions are unwarranted. See Thomas and Bush.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
I’m glad someone else picked up on the “Cardinal Spellman” goof. And, since it’s Matt we’re talking about, “Cardinal Spelling” is just delicious.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Dang way to slow…
spelling=Matt’s kryptonite
May 4th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Here is a case for Pam Karlan as a liberal counterweight to Scalia:
http://www.law.upenn.edu/blogs/dskeel/archives/2009/05/pam_karlan_and_souters_seat–s.html
I concur. If you want a razor sharp legal mind combined with a true gift for writing, Karlan is the choice.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Ron E. Says: “Seems to me that Matt and Rosen should do their homework and actually read her opinions before they rush to publish insinuations that she’s dumb.”
I think it is more important to read her stuff to see if she is QUALIFIED. We should assume that they are stupid staus quo placeholders until proven otherwise.
It is painfully obvious that her only qualification is “Hispanic female”.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
A single, or indeed many counterexamples is insufficient to invalidate a presumption. We presume somebody at trial is innocent until the trial is concluded, even though many such people end up found guilty.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
and what Jim Says.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
She’s a Yale Law grad on the Court of Appeals. Why is it “painfully obvious” that her only qualification is being a Hispanic female? Typical wingnut horseshit.
May 4th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
GW Bush has a MBA from Harvard and he’s still an idiot.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that the presumed intelligence of the average business school graduate is lower than that of the average law school grad.
May 4th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Conservatives forced Bush to drop his nomination of Harriet Miers because she wasn’t terribly bright. They wound up getting two first rate Justices out of Bush, about the only thing salvageable from his terms.
May 4th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
This isn’t something I’ve written about up until now
The point of this post could have been made without ever writing about it.
May 4th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Six liberal beliefs about IQ:
- IQ is a useless, discredited, racist hoax.
- Liberals have much higher IQs than conservatives (ask Matt about his role in propagating the notorious IQ by State Hoax: http://www.isteve.com/iqhoax.htm )
- Obama is better than Bush as President because of his higher IQ
- In contrast to the White House, IQ doesn’t matter much in the Supreme Court
- All people are the same in intellectual capacity.
- I’m better than most people because I believe all people are the same in intellectual capacity … and because I have a high IQ!
May 4th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
If Obama were to listen to some of these comments, it seems he would be compelled to appoint a justice based on LSATs.
Some of these posts are truly idiotic. So tell me all of you who think you belong to the fraternity of truly brilliant legal minds: Why is it necessary to have someone who is purportedly a superman among legal thinkers? Also, what exactly makes someone a brilliant legal thinker anyway? Roberts is supposedly a smarter-than-the-average-lawyer lawyer, but his views and ideas are repellent. This is Ivy League “meritocracy” run amok.
So the bar is now set higher for someone such as Sotomeyer. She’s either not that smart by high-flown standards hardly anyone can meet, or she is a jerk who cannot work well with others. You guys are unreal.
I’d prefer Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer to some of you jerks and the choices you would make or have Obama make.
May 4th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Rosen’s analysis is shameful and bankrupt. Not only has he failed to read her analysis, but he is basing his review on interviews with detractors who never worked with her. This is a hatchet job of the first degree. http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2009/05/hatchet-job-jeffrey-rosens-utterly.html
May 4th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Puerto Rican women, the new glass ceiling.
May 4th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
I remember that as a federal district judge, Judge Sotomayor authored a great opinion holding that a workfare program that paid participants $1/hr. violated minimum wage laws. What made it amazing was that there were 140 findings of fact, and while her clerks probably had a lot to do with that, the fact that she saw fit to do that made the opinion so compelling, and more likely to survive appeal.
The cite is Archie v. Grand Central Partnership, 997 F. Supp. 504.
May 4th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
It seems odd that none of the critics who say Sotomayor “lacks intellectual firepower” seem to have verifiable names. They are either anonymous, or comments on a blog.
May 4th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
As a Yale Law grad, former Second Circuit clerk, and attorney practicing in New York, I have never heard before today the sneer that Sotomayor isn’t that bright. Sort of unpleasant–sure. And when I did clerkship interviews, my conversation with her definitely qualified as the least pleasant; she was perfectly fair, but tough and unforgiving of mental sloppiness and not very warm. But everyone in the legal circles I run in respects her as being smart as hell, and somehow I think folks suggesting that her “demeanor” somehow disqualifies her may be applying a wee bit of a double standard–cough–Scalia–cough.
May 4th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
“The point is that the PRESUMPTION is unwarranted, as Thomas, Bush, and others prove.”
A couple examples of the presumption BEING rebutted doesn’t mean the presumption is unwarranted. That’s how a presumption works, it’s not always going to be right.
May 4th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
dan says: “How do the last eight years make that argument? Do you think the Bush administration is characterized by intellectual firepower gone bad?”
No, and that’s my point. The sea of intellectual firepower at Bush’s disposal proved to be a poor indicator of his administrations judgement and success. To be clear, I wasn’t advocating the benefits of having dullards on the bench.
“Why? An advanced and complex society governed by the rule of law is going to have sophisticated and complex laws, and the application of those laws in the most fitting way to complex and rapidly changing institutions will be no easy matter.”
It seems to me that the Constitution is, by design, fairly straightforward. The circumstances it deals with may change quickly, but the reasoning and principles used to interpret it don’t. I believe that once you strip away the legalese of any given opinion, the justness of that opinion should be readily apparent, especially to layman like myself. So again, once an intellectual threshold has been met, here are far more important qualities than a surplus of I.Q. points to be weighed.
May 4th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
“I think folks suggesting that her “demeanor” somehow disqualifies her may be applying a wee bit of a double standard–cough–Scalia–cough.”
Certainly, it shouldn’t disqualify her, but- and I say this as a fan of hers- it does raise a problem. We’ve got a lot of evidence of Scalia’s demeanor pushing moderates away- Souter and Kennedy, in particular. But with only four seats on the court, liberals should want to ATTRACT someone, presumably Kennedy. If her demeanor is too bad, we may find the good guys end up on the wrong side of a lot more 5-4 opinions. Personalities count a lot more than we’d like to think on the court.
Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if the “demeanor” complaints are just a little bit of gender bias, but I really don’t have anything to back that up with.
May 4th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Tony Smith,
The linked dissenter studies “critical race theory” and is a member of a minority group, being African-American. I think I’m going to wait for an established name who doesn’t have glaringly obvious sympathies with Sotomayor to pen a defense of her scholarship, thanks.
May 4th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Right Billare; everyone knows that the most objective and trustworthy sources are anonymous.
May 4th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
And white, apparently.
And @wmb, I certainly never said I was among the elite pantheon of legal thinkers. I didn’t even say Sotomayor wasn’t. All I said was that’s what I want, and that’s what Obama should be looking for. And that does take something more than just being a very intelligent person with a good legal mind, which Sotomayor obviously is.
May 4th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Cardinal Spellman was a friend of Pius XII, and there are plenty of negative things to say about him (I remember laughing when an upstart Classics journal asked a wide variety of people to name the greatest Roman bore and Allen Ginsburg nominated Cardinal Spellman), but in fairness to the guy he took a fairly strong stand for religious liberty at the Vatican Council, and I’m pretty sure it would be fair to say that no current American Catholic hierarch would dare stand up for the independence of the American church and resistance to reducing it to a branch of Vatican Inc. to the extent that Spellman did.
May 4th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Correction: She went to Cardinal Spellman HS.
May 4th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Interestingly, one must be a lawyer to have an opinion, and cannot be a minority–and one must have an established name, such as Anonymous. That sure disproves the claims of liberals that the court is too white, male, and tainted by upper-class biases.
I would also like to note that many are confusing “intellectual firepower” with getting good grades in law school. Most everyone with a top 10% gpa in an Ivy League school is vain and money-grubbing to a degree that is strongly indicative of mental imbalance. To me there should be a strong presumption against someone so disturbed that they would waste years of their life seeking nothing but glory through ass-kissing and banal careerism.
May 4th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Does it really seem odd? If you were a lawyer practicing before the Second Circuit, would you invite the wrath of one of the judges by criticizing her intellect?
The simple fact is that Rosen didn’t report one or two anonymous rumors; he reported something that’s an open secret within the Second Circuit, and should be part of the debate if this judge is going to be seriously considered as a candidate for the Supreme Court. Sotomayor’s drawbacks make her very unlikely to have any influence on other justices of the Supreme Court, and I’d prefer people knew that now instead of regretting it later. We shouldn’t let lawyers’ understandable fear of going on record about her result in omitting a very relevant datum — her reputation among her colleagues and lawyers who know the court well — from the public understanding of what kind of candidate she is.
May 4th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
I haven’t read enough of Sotomayor’s opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor’s detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths.
But yeah, people defending Rosen’s articles are just concerned about fair-mindedness and objectivity.
May 4th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
The New Republic. Why am I not surprised? They were also instrumental in sinking Lani Guinier. TNR is a neocon rag, and I’m not renewing my subscription.
May 4th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
I bet she has a higher IQ than Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who studied at Huntingdon College and went to law school at the University of Alabama before being found unqualified by the Senate Judiciary Committee for an appointment to the Federal Bench. To be fair to Sessions, they didn’t reject him because he’s as stupid as a pile of horse manure. They rejected him because he said he didn’t stop liking the KKK until he found out they were a bunch of pot heads.
May 4th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
“her reputation among her colleagues and lawyers who know the court well”
The problem is, we don’t know if these people know the court “well”. That’s the problem with unnamed sources, we don’t know if this is a guy who’s in her courtroom every week, or a guy who did one thing in front of her five years ago. We don’t know if it’s someone who brought in an obviously deficient argument and got rightly spanked for it, or constantly needled the judges, or just caught them at a bad time that didn’t reflect who they really were. We don’t know if the clerks were following the case at oral argument enough to understand what was going on, or if they even could have grasped what a “penetrating” question would be in that particular case. Hell, we don’t even know how many people say this- Rosen calls it both a “range” and “not enough”.
Given that- and given the amount of direct refutations, even present in Rosen’s article- I rather doubt that this is an open secret, your handle not whithstanding.
May 4th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Second Circuit say:
“…would you invite the wrath of one of the judges by criticizing her intellect?”
If your “concern” was genuine, you valued your integrity, and possessed the intellectual firepower to defend your charge, yes. If not, you’re an undisciplined character assassin, common gossip or worse, and your opinion should be dismissed out of hand.
May 4th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
“So it struck me as wrong to run with an anonymous disparaging remark in the absence of actual evidence.”
So wtf are you running with anonymous disparaging remarks posted by someone else? That doesn’t get you off the hook for perpetuating this ridiculously sexist and racist meme.
May 4th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Classist, too. And hetero-normative.
May 4th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Feel free to doubt it, or to doubt my honesty. Maybe I’m being secretly paid by Elena Kagan, after all. And I, too, am anonymous.
That said, I’m acquainted through my work with lots of Second Circuit clerks, and they have uniformly said their respective judges (from all across the ideological spectrum) did not think highly of Sotomayor. I can also confirm Rosen’s reporting about the views of federal prosecutors (mostly liberal Democrats). (BTW, Rosen wasn’t reporting the views of “a guy.” He says he spoke to a range of people.)
Meanwhile,I’ve yet to see a response to my basic point, which is that the only way this information is going to come out is anonymously. No one who practices before a judge (at least no one with half a brain) is going to go on record saying she’s a mediocrity. So if we want to know how she’s regarded by her colleagues and the bar, it’s pretty much anonymous comments or nothing. (Jeff Rosen reading her opinions and giving us his view won’t tell us that.) And we should want to know, before wasting a Supreme Court pick on someone who is unlikely to influence her colleagues and isn’t a particularly good judge.
Can anonymous comments prove she’s a mediocre judge, or held in low regard? No. Should they be the death knell for her candidacy? No. But her reputation within the Circuit is a pretty damn important indicator of how successful a Justice she would be, and let’s not kid ourselves that there’s any way that information is going to come out other than anonymously. So your position is one that effectively says you’d rather not know about her reputation (or at least not know anything bad). I just think that’s crazy. — if nothing else, let’s be sure this issue is vetted before President Obama invests a precious Supreme Court appointment in her.
May 4th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Really? I guess we should get rid of whistleblower-protection statutes, and “dismiss out of hand” all whistleblowing accusations from people who aren’t willing to jeopardize their livelihoods.
Let’s be real. Anonymity may not make me courageous — like most lawyers, I’m not an exemplar of courage — but it has nothing to do with integrity. I feel perfectly comfortable with my integrity as long as what I’m saying is completely truthful. And it is. So feel free to disbelieve me, and disbelieve all the other gutless Democrats Rosen spoke to who have some mysterious, coordinated axe to grind with Judge Sotomayor. I have enough faith in President Obama to believe that he won’t just stick his head in the sand and dismiss the anonymous comments “out of hand.” I’m not asking him to take my word for it. I just want to make sure they look into her reputation. (And I know what they’ll conclude when they do.) I don’t see how anyone who wants the President to make a successful appointment could want anything different. None of us will be happy if he makes a historic appointment who turns out to be a dud.
May 4th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
“she’s had a more interesting range of life experiences than your typical Yale Law graduate”
Just what are the typical life experiences of a Yale Law graduate? Is there a “typical” one? How closeminded.
May 4th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Meanwhile,I’ve yet to see a response to my basic point, which is that the only way this information is going to come out is anonymously.
It’s fascinating how Sotomayor is apparently the first judge in history who can only be criticized by anonymous “whisteblowers.”
May 4th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
“Really? I guess we should get rid of whistleblower-protection statutes, and “dismiss out of hand” all whistleblowing accusations from people who aren’t willing to jeopardize their livelihoods.”
Whistle-blowers are hardly anonymous sources to “open secrets.” The information they offer isn’t speculative or subject to bias, it’s verifiable out of the public eye.
“…disbelieve all the other gutless Democrats Rosen spoke to who have some mysterious, coordinated axe to grind,”
And there it is, the smoking dumb.
May 4th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
“I can’t help but relish the delicious possibilities of reducing the GOP’s share of the Latino vote even further thanks to a ham-handed right wing attack on a gifted and eminently qualified Latina SC nominee”
Exactly. Nominating Sotomayor would be giving the GOP the rope so them they could hang themselves. It would be wonderful.
May 4th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
“But her reputation within the Circuit is a pretty damn important indicator of how successful a Justice she would be, and let’s not kid ourselves that there’s any way that information is going to come out other than anonymously.”
Yeah, the good-ol’white boy rumor-mill is always an important source of info about women of color trying to break into their ranks.
Jackass.
Matt, please take down this ridiculously racist post.
May 4th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
“Feel free to doubt it, or to doubt my honesty.”
It’s not really about honesty (I guess it could be, but I’m not going to presume anyone’s being dishonest without at least knowing them), it’s about perspective. A clerk in someone else’s chamber, fresh out of law school and only interacting with THEIR judge and other clerks, may miss key aspects of the judge, or misinterpret a judge’s passing frustration, or not fully understand the issues of a case not assigned to them. A prosecutor who truly believed in his position could still have been wrong, and rightly smacked down. There’s a dozen other examples, and I don’t know if any of them were the case, but I don’t know that they WEREN’T, and that’s why I gotta take this info with a grain of salt.
“uniformly said their respective judges (from all across the ideological spectrum) did not think highly of Sotomayor.”
Well, many of those colleagues have spoken very highly of her, so someone’s lying. Yet another problem with the anonymous sources.
“the only way this information is going to come out is anonymously”
Perhaps, but not in the completely unverified manner Rosen chose. First of all, former clerks and lawyers who no longer practice in front of her would have nothing to fear. If Rosen couldn’t track them down, that’s a fault of his journalistic ability. Second, several of these sources could have been verified a little without giving away who they were (for example, “a civil lawyer who argued in front of the second circuit several times” or something). We could use something similar to the ABA’s method, which still uses anonymous sources, but verifies their opinions and puts them in a more useful format. (The ABA would also be a lot more reliable than Rosen, who pretty spectacularly misled on the analysis of Winter’s footnote). Finally, even if we couldn’t know ANYTHING about these people, they could have at least given us specific incidents to illustrate their opinions, rather than vague notiong of “bullying”, “full of herself”, or “not that bright”.
“So your position is one that effectively says you’d rather not know about her reputation (or at least not know anything bad).”
Not in the slightest. I have no where said that these people shouldn’t speak up, or that we don’t need such information. Indeed, as a gossip-hound, I WANT such information. It’s just that without some kind of verification, what they say isn’t very reliable. It could all be verified VERY EASILY, if true, without sacrificing their anonymity. Until that happens, though, I gotta take it with a grain of salt.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
I read last year a large number Sotomayor opinions (including 100% of certain types of cases) in order to handicap an appeal to her court, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. I admit I read more than I needed because there was already talk then of her nomination if the Democrat won in 2008.
She is a run-of-the-mill center-left Democrat appeals court judge. Which is to say extremely smart but below average for the Supreme Court, and would make an blandly acceptable justice.
However as a partisan Democrat and progressive, to choose her because of diversity would be a horrible trade off. Diversity is highly desirable. Tokenism is not, and this what nominating her would be.
What the left needs right now is both a brilliant firebrand like Douglas and a brilliant, solidly liberal consensus builder like Brennan. Sotomayor lacks ability and/or will to serve either role. She’d likely be a solid ticket puncher if there were a left majority on the Court, but right now the most liberal justice is an elderly Rockefeller Republican nominated by Gerald Ford. In other words, out of 9 justices, we have exactly 0 to the left of an Olympia Snowe and Joe Lieberman.
Granholm, Sullivan, and Kagen are all exciting picks because they’re liberals who can draw other justices left, including most crucially Kennedy and Breyer both of whom have been drifting right on a Court with passionate, intelligent, and articulate conservatives and no liberals of any sort. From from arresting them, on such a Court Sotomayor would drift toward the moderates rather than either swaying them or writing uncomfortable and withering dissents, which is exactly what she’s done on the Second Circuit.
May 5th, 2009 at 1:03 am
Anybody who supports this women should be ashamed.
She ruled against the firefighters in the Ricci case! In other words, she ruled in favor of the mayor of New Haven throwing out the results of the test firefighters took because he didn’t like the lack of brown faces in the firehouse. This appauling. Anybody who supports such racist injustice and putting race before competence in a area such as firefighter should be ashamed of themselves that includes Barak Obama and all the unrigourous liberal minds above who like almost all liberals don’t give a hoot about the contsuition outside of making sure the mastermind of 9/11 doesn’t have to endure any temporary discomfort, or to sue Arizonia ranchers for catching illegals on their property and driving them to the police station (”emotional distress”).
If liberals are using euphmisms to say shes michelle obama quality intellectual (aka really stupid), then she must be dumb, cause liberals hate nothing more than critizing Obama and/or anything Obama does or touches like Sonia Sotomayor.
May 5th, 2009 at 5:17 am
[...] Matthew Yglesias: Sonia Sotomayor’s IQ [...]
May 5th, 2009 at 7:21 am
Re Quoby
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that a person such as Mr. Quoby describes could be confirmed by the Senate. There would probably need to be 60 votes to break a filibuster and, even when Al Franken is seated, it is doubtful that conservative Democrats like Ben Nelso or Blanche Lincoln would support such a nomination and vote to end a filibuster.
Re daniel schwarz
I haven’t noticed that the senators who voted to confirm Clarence Thomas are showing any shame. Fuckface Thomas was nominated by Bush I because he was the dumbest Uncle Tom that could be found to replace Justice Marshall. But of course, to the daniel schwarzs of the world, goat fucking moron Thomas is the cats’ meow.
May 5th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Jeffrey Rose should understand that this is a charge the left makes against the right, not vice-versa. Don’t you hate it when the commentariate goes off script?
May 5th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Matt: Another “ridiculously racist” post to take down!
May 5th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Sounds like the Dems when Clarence Thomas was nominated. I think it’s reasonable to examine her intelligence, regardless of where she went to school. I also don’t recall such vigorous attempts by Dems to defend Bush’s IQ even though he was a Yale grad!
May 5th, 2009 at 10:39 am
did Michelle Obama not graduate from Princeton and Harvard?
now before the Obamathons start rabidly barking, Christopher Hitchens reviewed her thesis paper in Princeton and said
calling this a “paper” is being very kind. Point is there is no shortage of graduating imbeciles from Ivey League schools.
p.s would not be surprised if the comment is censored
May 5th, 2009 at 11:26 am
[...] Rosen’s anonymous friends’ concerns about Sonia Sotomayor’s intelligence aside, if you want to see a real reason why we’re [...]
May 5th, 2009 at 11:28 am
joez law of teh internetz: When you insult someone’s intelligence on an internet forum, you will make a spelling error that causes you to look like an idiot.
Get a brain, morans!
May 5th, 2009 at 11:33 am
I love the way racists try to pass as ordinary human, and fail at it.
“Lots of dumb people graduate from Harvard Law.”
Um…
“You know, like Michelle Obama.”
Um….
“You know, cuz Michelle Obama is really dumb.”
blank stare
“Stop calling me a racist!”
May 5th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Matt: Another “ridiculously racist” post to take down!
The funny thing is, if you want to make arguments about Sotomayor’s opinions, as Quoby did, they are a matter of public record. So much for this line of ridiculous bullshit:
Meanwhile,I’ve yet to see a response to my basic point, which is that the only way this information is going to come out is anonymously.
Racist moron.
May 5th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
can the people who support Sotomayor, please also say
that they:
1. support suing banks for not giving “enough” loans to minoritys and find such action constuitional.
2. support throwing out the results of tests firefighters take because they don’t like the lack of passing minoritys scores and find such action constuitional.
3. That they believe it’s unconstuitional for californians to vote to pass a proposition that would deny tax dollars to go to illegal imgrants.
stand up tall and pride!
May 5th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
How do borderline illiterates wind up with opinions about who belongs on the Supreme Court?
May 5th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Re Daniel Schwarz
Should one pay any attention to a fucking asshole like Mr. Schwarz who can’t even spell constitution? A visit to Mr. Schwarzs’ website (which I don’t recommend as it recalls visits to Don Blacks’ stormfront website) shows a bigoted shithead who hates Latinos.
May 5th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
great arguments guys!
you really made serious arguments, didn’t you?
why don’t you address somethin besides my lack of spellchecking?
how bout’ some actually arguments? how about you tell me how i’m wrong? tell me about why the mayor of new haven is right? etc.
May 5th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Would not a measure of her “brilliance” be the proportion of times her decisions are upheld or reversed at the next level compared to her peers(Sorry, I am not American and not sure if the next level is the USSC)
Now that would seem to be a qualitative metric
May 5th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Re Daniel Schwarz
How about Mr. Schwarz go fuck himself.
May 5th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
you are so brillant SLC
you really are such a great debater, so intellectual, not the slightest ad hominem out of you
i guess your to embarssed to pubicly affirm your absurd racist views, your fervent support for racial quotas, suing banks for not giving enough loans to black people.
but if you can’t defend yourself just call someone a racist, right?
May 5th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
[...] then the push back came. Matthew Yglesias took Rosen to task at TP after correctly noting, “You don’t see a lot of dumb kids growing up in the South Bronx and winding up at [...]
May 5th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Barbar Says: “Why is it “painfully obvious” that her only qualification is being a Hispanic female?”
It is painfully obvious BECAUSE, of the hundreds of thousands of lawyers in the US to choose from, we get notice of the one that fits perfectly in the stereotype of what a Democrat must POLITICALLY nominate to the post. Female = this is the “Sandra Day/female seat ” – check. Hispanic = all those new voters – check. The IV league connection = gravitas – check.
It doesn’t take a wingnut to see this forest for the trees.
May 6th, 2009 at 6:32 am
[...] Matt Yglesias responded To Jeffrey Rosen after making a very intriguing catch in the piece: I haven’t read enough of Sotomayor’s opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor’s detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths. [...]
May 6th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
[...] has had to deal with a sleazy anonymous whisper campaign, in which a “legal analyst” who hasn’t bothered to read her opinions [...]
May 7th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
[...] Matt Y. [...]
May 7th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
Why is anybody taking Rosen’s piece seriously? He has as much credibility as Stephen Glass.
May 8th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
[...] a nominee who is not the very best and the brightest, a claim Think Progress’s Matt Yglesias is quick to jump on. It seems to me that when you see a person who appears to be qualified in all the normal ways, you [...]
May 9th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
For testimony about character to be admissible, we need to know who is saying it so we can assess their credibility and the nature of their relationship to the defendant. I love this country.
So here’s a first-hand account of her qualities to be a judge published in the Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124183198437502843.html
It his highly positive, so those who have an experience to the contrary need to speak now or live with the consequences.
May 10th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
I hate to break this you guys, but above a certain level you really can’ty quantify intellect. Why don’t you judge people by the quality of their work? Hey, that’s a novel idea.
Rosen couldn’t attack Sotomayor’s work, so he created a new image of Sotomayor. He transformed her from an Ivy League trained judge who sits on the Court of Appeals into a dumb, low class, abrasive Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx who was just handed degrees from Princeton and Yale because of her last name. (That only happens if your last name is Bush.)
He turned her into The Other and that made her much easier to attack.
As for Rosen’s anonymous sources, how do you know he even used any sources at all? Only journalists use sources. Gossip columnists usually make it up.
May 11th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
[...] No kidding. If Rosen has not (by his own admission) adequately researched her written work, then he should have refrained from publishing anonymous ad hominem attacks—especially in light of the abundant contrary evidence suggesting that she is, in fact, pretty smart. Matthew Yglesias makes the same point here. [...]