in deciding legal issues before the Court, period. Each decision should be based on the facts presented and not anyone's personal biases, Sotomayor has no business being appointed to the Supreme Court.

Life experience is worthless? Interesting comment and it may take a lifetime to understand it but then if I did take a lifetime to understand it, I would be using my experiences and therefore I would be out of place. It appears that anyone who can look up words in a dictionary and has a law degree can be a SCOTUS according to you. Are you this stupid or has your life experiences created such a void of wisdom and knowledge?

mrliberal:

in deciding legal issues before the Court, period. Each decision should be based on the facts presented and not anyone's personal biases, Sotomayor has no business being appointed to the Supreme Court.

Spoken like someone who's never been near a courtroom. Its way more complicated than that. Life is more complicated than that. Facts are usually disputed in court. Someone has to decide them, i.e., interpret the factual presentations that they hear. That introduces a human element. It can't be avoided.

Will you call for the immediate resignation or impeachment of Alito, then.

Of course, you really can't be taken seriously, at all. The sum of our experiences influence the decisions we make. This is true for every single Justice that has ever sat on the bench. To pretend otherwise is patently absurd.

Mr Liberal himself has no opinions or personal beliefs which affect his job performance. Why can't we expect our Supreme Court to live up to his high standards?

I don't understand why people think that someone can just shut off being human because they become a judge. Just as your life experiences, education, training may cause you to approach a problem at your work one way, it causes a judge to look at it in their own way. If disqualification of judges occurred because they said that examining life experiences was important, then you would only have judges on the bench who are dishonest or oblivious to their own biases. Sounds like a great judiciary.

The point with Sotomayor is that she recognizes that because of her life experiences, she thinks a certain way. She must always review that way of thinking to make sure that she is not overlooking someone or something because of it. These are the type of people who should make excellent nominees. I am more of the liberal bent, but if there were a conservative judge who said the same thing and I believed them, I would support their nomination. There are not enough judges out there who are willing to do that. Scalia certainly doesn't. The man is so arrogant that he could never be biased to a viewpoint, even though his is always right. That is the worst kind of judge.

Was not the Constitution written by guys reacting to certain life experiences that led them to rethink governance?

dbguy:

mrliberal:

in deciding legal issues before the Court, period. Each decision should be based on the facts presented and not anyone's personal biases, Sotomayor has no business being appointed to the Supreme Court.

Spoken like someone who's never been near a courtroom. Its way more complicated than that. Life is more complicated than that. Facts are usually disputed in court. Someone has to decide them, i.e., interpret the factual presentations that they hear. That introduces a human element. It can't be avoided.

That's right. And it's not only the facts that might be in dispute. In fact, at the appellate and USSC levels, what's really disputed is procedural -- i.e., what testimony and what evidence was allowed or suppressed, were the judge's instructions to the jury fair, impartial, and consistent with the law, was there any issue with jury selection, etc.

Such questions are simply not amenable to simple algorithms. They require complex thought and human judgement. That's why we have human judges.

Aw c'mon. If Deep Blue can beat any human in chess, surely we can surrender our justice system to unbiased, impartial computers, eh? Why not?

and are the only demographic left without any personal biases.

When you are surrounded by people who are just like you, you tend to not question your own biases and instead take them as truisms.

This is true for everyone, including minority groups. Within Sonia Sotomayor's social group it is not so controversial to discuss the merits of a "wise Latina woman's experience". No more than for african-americans to discuss a "strong, black woman" or white country club types agreeing on what is in "good taste". (wealthy white WASPs, are in fact, a minority group with their own culture, like any other)

Begs the question, Sotomayor has expressly agreed with you.What more do you require?

So when the Supreme Court issued the "race-neutral" opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) there was nothing available to their life experience that might have indicated they were constituitonalizing a national apartheid? Would not consideration of the experience of living in a time with widespread racial animus being expressed in the law have actually improved the judgment in that case? Wasn't it the mechanical lawmaking you advocate that gave us Plessy: ignore the world, focus on the game?

So when Plessy was overturned in Brown v. Board on the rationale that segregation was inherently stimitizing for minorities, that conclusion (segregation=inherently stigmatizing) had nothing to do with life experience and could be reached by following the "fact presented and not anyone's personal experiences." You do know that in every case two stories are presented for acceptance and distinguishing between them relys on both reason and experience: the combination of the two that could be called common sense..

You equate experience with bias....what fanny did you pull that silly notion out of?

People make law, not machines.