by Mary Sanchez

I'd like to hear Sonia Sotomayor unleash a sassy tongue-lashing on the oh-so-predictable detractors who are circling as if a weaker species has wandered into their den.
by Jennifer Kohnke

I wish Sonia Sotomayor didn't have quite so much empathy.

I'd like to hear her unleash a sassy Nuyorican tongue-lashing on the oh-so-predictable detractors who are circling as if a weaker species has wandered into their den.

But taking the low road is not how she got this far -- from the much-mentioned housing project childhood to the threshold of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sotomayor suffers from curse of the first. The knee-jerk (and simply jerk) remarks that followed her selection as the first Hispanic to be nominated to the Supreme Court are likely old hat to her. Take the comments insinuating that she couldn't possibly be qualified. That, somehow, the rules along the way must have been bent for someone of her pedigree, or rather lack of one. That she slipped into Princeton and Yale through some backdoor route for minorities and mistakenly landed in the president's sights.

Most of her critics didn't even have the tact to veil their conceit.

John Yoo, an American Enterprise Institute scholar and the towering legal intellect who okayed the Bush torture policy, certainly didn't mince words: "... empathy has won out over excellence in the White House."

Rush Limbaugh predictably called her "an affirmative action case extraordinaire."

But what such juvenile critics don't grasp is that the very thing she is being criticized for -- empathy -- is why she will slay them in their tracks. And they won't even feel it.

Sotomayor has spent a lifetime learning how to read people unlike herself. She has had to.

Being bilingual and bicultural means she understands codes of conduct for the Bronx, for the parochial high school she graduated from as valedictorian, for Princeton, where she initially felt intimidated, for Yale law school, for private law practice breaking counterfeit rings for luxury goods, and for the federal bench.

That is a lot of social ground for one person to cover, far more than anyone who was given a Reed & Barton silver spoon at birth ever has to evolve through.

Such grounding raises a person's emotional intelligence. It can stretch a person's ability to think broadly.

Sotomayor has been widely quoted to the effect that, in any given case, a Latina jurist might "reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." This was in response to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's contention that a wise man and a wise woman could be expected to reach the same judicial decision.

What isn't mentioned are the rest of Sotomayor's comments: "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."

That is the statement of a person willing to look at her own bias humbly, as well as at that of others, and ensure it does not influence the outcome of the question at hand. This doesn't mean she will seek to tweak the Constitution to always favor the little guy.

In fact, judging her by previous rulings, Sotomayor is not so easily labeled. She has sided with big business, and against investors. She has turned aside allegations of racial and age discrimination. Those rulings are as much a part of her legal background as when she ruled in favor of a city that threw out the results of a firemen's test because it didn't produce the diversity of candidates desired.

Even pro-choice advocates are nervous as they scour her writings, not quite so sure she will be the magic vote to keep Roe v. Wade intact.

Sotomayor is difficult to predict because she has the ability to read the world through many people's eyes, not simply her own.

"I am an ordinary person," she has said, "blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences."

That is not a statement of entitlement. Sotomayor changed her class and social status. You can bet she learned a few lessons along the way.

 

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