Jeffrey Rosen, after initially flubbing his analysis of Sonia Sotomayor with a series of what seemed like predetermined conclusions based on surface qualities, has spent the past few weeks doing what someone of his legal expertise ought to be doing: providing insightful analysis of Sotomayor's jurisprudence based on her rulings. First there was this TIME piece noting that, despite the focus on Sotomayor's racial background, her most liberal inclinations appear in cases involving immigration and sex discrimination. Rosen surmises that Sotomayor's immigration views might shed some light on how she could rule on issues of executive power, writing that "Sotomayor could prove skeptical of the claim often made by the government that the rights of aliens differ sharply from the rights of citizens in the war on terrorism and in other cases."
Today, in a piece for The New Republic, Rosen takes a closer look at the areas in which Sotomayor might move the court slightly to the left, and concludes that when it comes to issues of civil liberties and economics, Sotomayor would be more liberal than David Souter. Interestingly, Rosen makes several comparisons between Sotomayor and the right's intellectual champion on the court, Antonin Scalia. Rosen isn't necessarily saying he thinks Sotomayor is as smart as Scalia, but the comparisons are still likely to itch behind the eyeball of any conservative who reads Rosen's piece, since one of the lines of criticism against Sotomayor is that she doesn't come close to approximating Scalia's brilliance.
The comparisons also don't mean Sotomayor is a "liberal Scalia." Rosen writes that "what makes [Sotomayor's] dissents so interesting is that sometimes, she'll use Scalia-like methods to achieve results that Scalia would embrace, but that in other instances would cause his head to explode." That'll make for an interesting next few years.
-- A. Serwer
