To be fair to Jeff Rosen, who's had a terrible drubbing here at TAPPED in recent days, I'll point out that today, he published an update to his already-infamous anti-Sotomayor piece. Rosen now argues, outright, that the next Supreme Court justice should be a woman, saying, "the next justice should indeed be a she." And like many a misunderstood writer before him, Rosen blames the piece's bad reception on its provocative headline. (In other words, he is blaming his editors.) "The headline--'The Case Against Sotomayor'--promised something much stronger than I intended to deliver," Rosen writes. "As soon as the piece was published, I regretted the headline, which I hadn't seen in advance." I feel you, man. But I think it was the anonymous sources repeating race and gender stereotypes -- not the headline -- that really pissed people off.
Today, though, Rosen goes beyond anonymous quotes, marshaling up some actual evidence to back his claims that Sotomayor is temperamental and rude. He quotes at length from the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, a compendium of (albeit anonymous) attorneys' opinions of the judges before whom they appear. Some praised her writing and said she was well-prepared for hearings and an active listener. Others, however, seemed quite unimpressed with Sotomayor, calling her "a terror," "difficult," and "nasty."
Still, it is totally unclear if people would be quite so surprised and taken aback by this egotistical behaivor if the judge in question were not a woman of color, but instead a "regular" old white guy. A number of sociological studies have shown that in the workplace, both men and women perceive women's aggression as negative, even as they accept similar behaivor from male leaders. That Rosen still hasn't dealt with this reality -- that women and people of color are so often held to different, unfair standards -- speaks to the real weakness of both his pieces.
--Dana Goldstein
