Skip to main content

Chatting with Sonia Sotomayor

By


Last night, Charlie Rose had Sonia Sotomayor on his show discussing her recent book, My Beloved World. They covered a lot of ground on the show including how to write a Supreme Court position paper.  They mentioned some of the well crafted positions of the past, such as Hugo Black's position on Brown v. Board of Education and how Justice Sotomayor crafted hers, which have been criticized for being "dry."

It was quite interesting as she said she said Obama put her on a bit of a hot seat by saying he chose a justice nominee who brought empathy to the bench, and found herself having to defend herself before the Senate in this regard.  She said she had no idea what the President meant by it, other than she brought her own personal experience to the bench, as each justice does, but she feels it is very important to have proper legal grounding to all her decisions, not let herself be influenced by any emotional response to a particular case brought before her.

In her autobiography, she presents her personal experience in her "evocative, plain-spoken prose."

Comments

  1. avrdsFebruary 8, 2013 at 8:15 PM

    I thought this was an interesting profile of her new life in Washington. I wonder when the Post will take the initiative to look into the lives of other justices ....

    http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-02/local/36705493_1_justice-sotomayor-third-female-justice-sonia-sotomayor

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Rick DiguetteFebruary 9, 2013 at 12:18 AM

      Oh my, does she ever sound like a judge. Having worked and written for appelate courts judges, one thing I learned is that they will second guess anything and everything.

      Delete
  2. TripplerFebruary 9, 2013 at 4:12 AM

    She should replace Roberts as Chief Justice. Be nice if Scalia & Thomas retired so that the court can go in a more justice oriented direction.

    ReplyDelete
  3. TripplerFebruary 9, 2013 at 4:21 AM

    I just finished reading the following book:

    ''CHARLATAN - America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam''

    By Pope Brock


    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/books/31maslin.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


    Though the book is filled with tragedy and though the principle character was, technically speaking, a murderer, you couldn't help but feel sorry for him when he got shafted by the courts. Brock succeeds in painting a very paradoxical portrait of an enigmatic and complex figure who is a truly sympathetic rogue.

    He made millions through shrewd investments. But in the end, he wound up broke. Among his many achievements was the creation of what evolved into Rock & Roll radio, creation of modern day political campaigning, caused government to stiffen medical licensing, and to heighten regulation which intervened in the prevention of medical quackery.


    Very good reading.

    ReplyDelete
  4. James FergusonFebruary 9, 2013 at 10:51 AM

    With the vote on health care, it seems that Roberts isn't the ideologue that the Conservatives wanted heading the bench. The two ideologues are Scalia and Thomas, who never waver in their decisions. The inscrutable Thomas rarely utters a word when presiding in court, breaking seven years of stony silence with the cryptic comment, "Well -- he did not."

    http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/justice-clarence-thomas-breaks-seven-silence-court-200102112.html

    Sotomayor prefers to keep quiet on her colleagues, but Breyer is not afraid to wrangle with Scalia over his concept of "original intent" of the Constitution,

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4n8gOUzZ8I

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more