The XX Factor: What women really think.

Is Sotomayor the New Alito?

Now that the insulting question of whether Sonia Sotomayor is just another Harriet Miers has subsided, a new one arises: Does Barack Obama's nominee have more in common with conservative justice Sam Alito? Liberals opposed Alito far more strenuously than they did current Chief Justice and George W. Bush nominee John Roberts. An Italian from working-class roots who also attended Princeton, Alito wields the same, "up from the bootstraps" personal history as Sotomayor. And—much like the Obama administration's emphasis on its nominee's "wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life's journey"—the Bush White House stressed... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

What About Sotomayor's Underlying Sentiment?

You're right, Hanna. The White House, and Sotomayor, too, by agreeing to the walk back, are giving the "wise Latina" mini-fracas more air, not less. Her speech sparked an interesting and even vital discussion this week about the value of having judges with different life experiences on the bench. Now we move to hedging and hemming and hawing? I'll ask the next question they'd all be better off not spending the weekend fielding... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Of Course the Bench Would Be Better With More Latina Judges

A guest post from Cornell law professor Eduardo M. Peñalver, who clerked on the Second Circuit for Judge Guido Calabresi and on the Supreme Court for Justice John Paul Stevens:

As some of you have pointed out, considered in the context the rest of her speech, it is clear that Sotomayor merely meant that appointing “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences” to the bench would (on average) do more to improve judicial decision-making than appointing a(nother) comparably wise white male judge. Understood in this way, the comment is benign and, more importantly, almost certainly true.

Crucial to understanding Judge Sotomayor’s argument is... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

The Mediocrity of Diversity

Emily, you are so right that Jeff Rosen’s unsupported whispers about Judge Sotomayor have become the conventional media wisdom in three short days. But more troubling still, he seems to have been arguing that female jurists are by definition “mediocre” for more than a decade! Here’s a piece he did for the New York Times in 1995, arguing that President Clinton’s “single-minded pursuit of diversity, combined with an eagerness to avoid controversy, has kept him from appointing the best available legal minds to the courts.” He then names the many, many white men passed over for federal judgeships and contends that liberal judges lack the intellectual firepower to challenge brilliant conservative jurists because “nearly 60 percent of the Clinton appointments have been minority members and women.” (Read: mediocre.) His single data point to illustrate that mediocrity: Instead of appointing a serious intellectual heavyweight to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (a/k/a “The scholars Court”), Clinton tapped “Diane P. Wood, a little-known professor of antitrust law at the University of Chicago, who is currently an assistant to Deputy Attorney General Anne Bingaman.”

That same mediocre Diane Wood is not only on every shortlist for the Supreme Court today. She’s also widely regarded as one of the finest judges on the bench, to whom other brilliant judges turn for reviews of draft opinions. I don’t begrudge Rosen or other white men who feel they are always the bridesmaid. But the suggestion that a diverse bench must inevitably be a second-rate bench is really quite shocking, even 15 years later.