Roger
Clegg explains how Sonia Sotomayor’s reading of the Ricci case indicates her judicial activism. Excerpt:
The classic instance of judicial activism
is making up a constitutional guarantee that is not actually in the
Constitution, and using that to strike down a state law. But judicial activism
can also involve ignoring a guarantee that in the Constitution to uphold a
statute that violates it.
And this gives us reason to suppose that
this distortion of the legal texts involved was driven by Sotomayor’s personal
policy preferences, the definition of judicial activism. Her now
well-publicized extrajudicial pronouncements in these areas suggest that she is
deeply immersed in identity politics. In particular, she has been very
aggressive in her support for affirmative action and other selection policies
to ensure politically correct numbers.
The
Washington Post reports that the Supreme Court today overturned the Ricci decision of the appellate court on
which Sotomayor served. Excerpt:
…the appellate judges [including Sototmayo]
have been criticized for producing a cursory opinion that failed to deal with
"indisputably complex and far from well-settled" questions, in the
words of another appeals court judge, Sotomayor mentor Jose Cabranes.
"This perfunctory disposition rests
uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal," Cabranes said,
in a dissent from the full 2nd Circuit's decision not to hear the case.