Blog 22

Sonia Sotomayor was going to be the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice and the third female Justice. Race and gender played a role in her qualifications as a Justice. She believes that judges out to look at the impact of their rulings on individual businesses and government. She also believes that her gender and race are assets to her being a judge. People that disagreed with her being sworn in as a Justice was because of comments that that she said that made her seem like a liberal activist and that her own personal and political agenda is more important than the law as written. People were concerned because she had shown a personal bias based on ethnicity and gender. Republicans wanted to make sure that before she was sworn in that she understood that the role of jurist in our country is to apply the law even-handedly, despite their own feelings or personal or political preferences. She has had a reputation of frequently arguing in favor of minority plaintiffs and points of view. In Ricci v. DeStefano, Sotomayor served as a 3-judge panel that declined to address the Constitutional issues of this case. White firefighters were sewing for reverse discrimination because when not enough minorities scored well enough on a promotional test, the test results were thrown out. Six of her decisions went to appeal, five of those six were reversed and the sixth decision, the court disagreed with her reasoning but kept the ruling.