Yale Daily News

"The daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants..."

People who come to the States from Puerto Rico are not immigrants.

It's irrelevant whether Sotomayor's classmates would have thought of her as a Supreme Court nominee. That's not news at all! Sotomayor's experience and expertise stands strong on their own.

Valid enough point, #2, but the YDN isn't going to beat the rest of the media on analysis of her decisions or judicial career. This is pretty much the same story they wrote about Alito in '05, except Sotomayor seems to have actually had friends.

Just what is that Animal behind her ?
Where is it located ? At Yale ?
Mythological creature of sorts .
cool creation yo

Good article. As is often the case, the YDN here does a much better, non-partisan job of reporting the news and including both sides' perspectives than what we see in the mainstream media.

The animal is a tiger, the Princeton mascot. The picture appears to have been taken in front of Nassau Hall, the oldest building at Princeton, Sotomayor's alma mater.

oh duhhh, thanx , it just has Princeton tagged all over the posted pic.But one never knows does one these days ? it looks like someone asked it an annoying question

Can the YDN dig up any photo of her from her time at YLS?

hate to be so superficial- but she's really unattractive, n'est-ce pas? also her voice is deep and unfeminine; the New York accent is quite grating and working class.

Of course, none of this has any relevance to her qualities as a jurist.

"and working class."

Not to many of those where you're from huh #9?

Someone who thinks and repeatedly says in public that her own gender and race make her judicial decisions better than those of judges not of her particular gender and race, and who belongs to a secretive, elite, gender-discriminatory group, is downright creepy.

Between 1994 and 2003 Sotomayor many times said in prepared public statements that "a wise Latina woman" should "reach a better conclusion than a white male" judge. As one of many examples, she has told the Senate Judiciary Committee that her October 2003 speech at Seton Hall University included the line: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion." Those are words she has told Sen. Feinstein were "poorly chosen" in the now-notorious 2001 remarks at Berkeley that Sotomayor later had the cheek to publish in a law review. Several of her speeches in Puerto Rico in 1994 and addresses at Yale and the City University of New York included similar outrageous claims.

Sotomayor belongs to the "Belizean Grove," an elite but little-known rich-and-powerful women’s-only group deliberately modeled on the egregious all-male "Bohemian Grove." But she claims her decisions are suffused with "empathy" for common people, the kind of Belize-refreshed "empathy" Marie Antoinette manifested herding her lambs at Versailles. And since when does a complex, difficult civil rights case get deep-sixed in the concrete overshoes of a one-paragraph dismissal? OOPS! Tender Ricci lambs get slaughtered for tasty spring dinners in Belize when the big girls party! Do the rich and powerful women in this group run naked in the Belize rainforest the way their emulated men are said to run naked in Bohemian Grove? Gross.

She does not belong on the Supreme Court. Or on any court in this country. It's a scandal that she's advanced as far as she has. She's an embarrassment to Yale Law School. It's an embarrassment that nobody at Yale is admitting it.

@11

If you're judging fitness, you should really read the whole speech, and the context of that remark. She was talking in specific about race/gender discrimination cases, and otherwise makes the point that impartiality is an "aspiration."

She's making the point (one made by Sam Alito at his confirmation as well) that who we are affects the decisions we make, that, while judges aspire to neutrality, the issues are rarely so cut and dried that an automaton could do the job. This is particularly true at the Supreme Court level, where the issues almost by definition _aren't_ cut and dried - if they were, the case wouldn't be being heard by SCOTUS.

#12

As it happens, I HAVE read the whole speech. Yes, Sotomayor generally discusses the old chestnut question of "inevitable influences." For the most part her speech rehearses (and not very well) points hoary generations before she walked into YLS. But she goes one, personal, step beyond just arguing that her gender and race will "inevitably affect" her decisions. She claims that HER decisions should more often than not be BETTER than the decisions of those not having her gender and race. Alito never said any such thing, and that's a good thing for his Supreme Court prospects because there would have been no real effort to explain or "contextualize" any claim by Alito that "a wise white man in the richness of his experience should more often than not reach a better conclusion than a woman of color." He would simply have been bounced.

Further, the entire effort to "contextualize" her bizarre claim within her one 2001 Berkeley address is misguided because Sotomayor didn't make her outrageous claim in just one speech. Rather, Sotomayor repeated essentially the same assertion, phrased in various ways, in many contexts and in many speeches since 1994, including at least one speech given at Yale. If one is judging fitness, one should really read (or at least take into account) that whole series of speeches.

And as for "aspiration," I for one cannot imagine how a federal judge who has made a practice of claiming that her ethnicity and gender should make her work product better than that of those not sharing those traits should have had the temerity to sit in judgment on the aspirations of male, white, dyslexic New Haven fireman Ricci.

#9: I have to disagree. She is strikingly sexy with her latina figure and accent. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but I wouldn't mind listening to jurisprudence.

"She is strikingly sexy with her latina figure..."

The woman looks like a refrigerator! Look, her figure is irrelevant to the appointment, but that's no reason to become unhinged. Please.

#11 and #13 you are absolutely right. If she had only said that an individual would reach a different conclusion that would be ok. But she said that someone like her would make a better judgment. And that too repeatedly. Its amazing how the MSM just ignored it. A very unqualified candidate, but identity politics helped.Now we are stuck with her.