Sonia Sotomayor

The deeply offended Stuart Taylor discovers that as a student, Sotomayor was very concerned about violence and intimidation of gay students on campus, as she wrote a letter to the school newspaper after the rooms of two gay students were ransacked. She also signed a letter criticizing the search process for a new assistant dean […]

Greg Sargent reports that Michael Steele has gently begun trying to wean the GOP off of attacking Sonia Sotomayor for reasons that have nothing to do with her work as a judge (my emphasis): In what seemed like an effort to distance the party from claims that Sotomayor is “racist” and an “Affirmative Action” pick, […]

Via Twitter, TPM News Editor Justin Elliott points out this “creepily gendered” Times headline: “Sotomayor’s Sharp Tongue Raises Issue of Temperament.” Indeed, I can’t remember the last time I heard a man referred to as “sharp tongued,” which strikes me as a synonym for catty, pushy, nasty, and a whole bunch of other terms usually […]

Most of the skepticism surrounding Sonia Sotomayor coming from liberals has to do with her not yet divined position on reproductive choice, as Tim and Sarah have been blogging about. But there’s another issue that I think merits greater examination, and that’s Sotomayor’s view of First Amendment rights. In Pappas v. Giuliani, Sotomayor dissented from […]

As Tim noted below, Charlie Savage’s piece in the Times this morning suggested more than it delivered on the alleged qualms in the reproductive rights community over Sonia Sotomayor’s position on abortion. As he says, surely she should be questioned about her view of the law in this area, but I don’t see — yet […]

The inimitable Charlie Savage takes a look at concerns on the left that Sonia Sotomayor might not be relied on to protect a woman’s legal right to choose an abortion if another challenge to Roe makes it to the Supreme Court. But it’s not clear that we can draw any conclusions about her views from […]

One of the clear effects of the Sotomayor nomination is that we’re going to be talking — a lot — about affirmative action, for the first time in awhile. Of course, there is the rehearsed sense of outrage, from conservatives, that this Hispanic woman was nominated at all. So many qualified white men were available […]

Put on your seat belts. Many Republicans have been itching for this fight. They figure if they can make Sonia Sotomayor appear “too liberal,” “too activist,” or “intemperate” — and cause Obama to withdraw her nomination, or if they can defeat her outright — they can slow the Obamomentum that’s leading to universal health care, […]

I was just part of a conference call that the White House held with law bloggers. There are a couple of takeaway points that may be of interest to readers following the nomination. First, Obama cited three criteria in choosing Sotomayor: 1) her intellectual capacity (as demonstrated in her sterling academic record, her success as […]

Weeks ago, Jeffrey Rosen wrote a scurrilous article for The New Republic in which he asserted, on the basis of anonymous gossip, that Sonia Sotomayor, summa cum laude of Princeton, recipient of the prestigious Pyne Prize, and editor of the Yale Law Journal, was “not that smart.” Rosen was candid enough to admit that he […]