Saturday, May 30, 2009

From a wise white woman: on Sotomayor


this is from the Staff Blog at the  New Yorker:

May 29, 2009
Close Read: The Lady Is a Judge

Sonia Sotomayor’s critics are up in arms about her lecture from 2001, “A Latina Judge’s Voice,” and especially these words:

    I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

It is, in one sense, funny that Newt Gingrich and the like hear this as Sotomayor saying that Latina women simply make better decisions than white men—as though the word “wise” weren’t there. What is it about the proximity of the word “Latina” that renders the word “wise” invisible? Or is it that “wise Latina” is heard not as a description of, say, a person who is wise and a Latina but as a call to central casting for the older friend in the chick flick who knows a lot about relationships and soup? (Or rice, beans, and pork—also, bizarrely, a point of contention.) Whatever else she may be, Sotomayor is not a stock character.

But she is saying something slightly complicated, or at least less suited for printing on a coffee mug than the saying, attributed to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, that “a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases.” Sotomayor says that she’s “not so sure,” noting that “wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society.” But she adds—and this is the point:

    We should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group…nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

    However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Others simply do not care. 

And how does her experience—“Being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion”—affect how she judges?

    I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. 

In other words, it inclines her to question biases—most importantly, her own. It makes her, in a way, a blinder justice, and thus one who is better able to see the things that actually matter.

Meanwhile, all those throwing John Roberts’s line about a judge just being an umpire, calling balls and strikes, at Sotomayor: Have they been to a ballgame lately? It’s not just that “unreasonable” and “cruel and unusual” are harder terms to call than “low and outside.” Warnings to pitchers, ejections, preventing brawls—those aren’t things that robots do. Just look at last night’s Red Sox game. (And there are other problems with the analogy—Sherrilyn Ifill has a good point regarding checked swings.) That gets back to the odd idea, explored in the Times today, that her reputation as a tough judge is a bad thing. So how mean is Sotomayor? Judge Guido Calabresi, her colleague on the Second Circuit, told the Times that “her behavior was identical” to that of her colleagues: it was the reactions that were different.

    “Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman,” Judge Calabresi added. “It was sexist, plain and simple.”

And, anyway, when the manager comes charging from the dugout—or when a government lawyer offers an argument whose logical extension might be that citizens who are tortured have no recourse in court—how ladylike do we want our umpires to be? Sometimes it can help to yell back.

Posted by Amy Davidson in CLOSE READ  link



 


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