As Dana notes below, Jeff Rosen has posted a much more thorough explanation of his objections to Sonia Sotomayor. Since I don’t want to repeat Dana’s arguments, I’ll just say this: it is completely possible that Sotomayor’s temperament is unsuitable for the high court. It may be that her legal writing is not always clear or distinguished. These are substantive criticisms compared to the the off-hand and dismissive impression given that “she’s not that bright.” Rosen didn’t bother to make that case the first time around, and as a journalist with his special skills, he was uniquely equipped to do so. In the absence of knowledge, people rely on what they already believe, and given Rosen’s previous expressed concern about the race and gender of the next supreme court justice, I found his original post disturbing.

Rosen writes in this in his update:

For the next Supreme Court seat, the president needs to be sure that the nominee’s temperament and abilities are not merely impressive but absolutely stellar. She–and the next justice should indeed be a she–must be ready to challenge the conservatives and persuade her fellow liberals from the very beginning.

I agree with just about everything Rosen says here. It does however, seem to be a departure from his recent concerns about Obama feeling “pressures of demographics and identity politics,” since Rosen is now himself applying that kind of pressure. This is an even more significant shift from his 1995 lament, highlighted by Dahlia Lithwick, that President Clinton‘s “single-minded pursuit of diversity, combined with an eagerness to avoid controversy, has kept him from appointing the best available legal minds to the courts.” As Lithwick also points out, the single person Rosen mentioned as a “diversity hire” was Diane Wood, who subsequently became “widely regarded as one of the finest judges on the bench, to whom other brilliant judges turn for reviews of draft opinions.” 

I doubt Wood is the reason for Rosen’s sudden conversion, so I’d be interested to hear why Rosen suddenly thinks appointing a woman is so important, especially in the context of his more than a decade of work fretting that diversity harms the intellectual quality of liberal judges on the bench.