Republicans may have decided to run off the rails and make race the focus of their attacks on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, but they are going to have to dig deep to find some evidence to support their claims that she would be biased in favor minority plaintiffs appearing before her. Tom Goldstein over at Scotusblog, one of the nation’s most kick-ass Supreme Court lawyers and bloggers, has studied every single one of Sotomayor’s opinions that are even remotely connected to a racial issue. And what did he find?
Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge.
In the 75 cases where Sotomayor sat on a panel of judges that rejected a discrimination claim, Sotomayor dissented a whopping two times. None of this is much of a surprise. Plaintiffs in federal employment discrimination cases almost always get slaughtered, and Sotomayor’s presence on the 2nd Circuit certainly doesn’t seem to have helped their cause much. If nothing else, Goldstein’s data ought to put to rest any GOP charges that Sotomayor is a radical activist looking to somehow tilt the rink because of her Puerto Rican heritage. At least when it comes to discrimination claims, Sotomayor’s work is virtually indistinguishable from all the other white guys she works with.
