Supreme Court Overturns Sotomayor's Court

[Pangloss]

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090629-710951.html

 

So in a nutshell the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against the lower court decision in which Sotomayor participated in the majority view -- her position was overturned.

 

Some things to bear in mind here:

 

1) Had Sotomayor already replaced Souter (and there'd been no conflict of interest), the decision by the Court would have been exactly the same, because Souter was in the dissent, expressing the exact same view that Sotomayor expressed.

 

2) The dissent is not an extremist position -- it's a disagreement between intelligent human beings. Three long-standing, well-respected (liberal) Supreme Court justices shared Souter/Sotomayor's view on this.

 

3) The overall percentage of Sotomayor decisions now overturned by the Supreme Court is something like two percent.

 

Regarding the decision itself, I happen to generally share the view of the majority (and disagree with Souter/Sotomayor's side), but that's the larger issue not the details. It does sound from the news stories that I've read that the majority (conservative) justices are correct here and that this was a case of reverse discrimination. They acknowledged that the city was in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" position here, but felt that that was insufficient cause to throw out the test results that had produced no minority applicants. Ginsberg disagreed, saying that there was ample evidence that the tests were flawed, but there is no evidence of malicious (racist) intent by the test designers or applicants, nor do we really even know if the test WAS really flawed, we simply have suggestive evidence that it MIGHT have been. So, bearing in mind my distant relationship with the facts, it seems like the city should have gone with the results.

 

But this in no way would bar me from supporting Sotomayor to replace Souter.

 

My opinion, for what it's worth.

[iNow]

It's rather telling that the decision was so close, and that it could have very easily gone the other way. I'll be curious if the AM radio talking heads and neocon blahblahblah-gers use this as an attack that "even the SCOTUS disagrees with Sotomayor... she should not be a justice herself!"

 

Thanks for posting. I hadn't heard about this until reading it here.