Category Archives: The Courts

Updated: SotoSetAsides: ‘I Am A Product Of Affirmative Action’

Affirmative Action, Intellectualism, Law, Multiculturalism, Race, Racism, The Courts

I’m shocked. Sonia SotoSetAsides once admitted that her test scores “were not comparable to her colleagues at Princeton and Yale” (with the exception of the scores of Mighty Michelle O). Nor were her scores on par with the scores of the forgotten students the system had helped her usurp.
I’m so disillusioned (irony alert to the prosaic among you). Weren’t we promised by the POTUS, another recipient of racial preferential treatment, that Sotomayor had a first-rate legal mind? Don’t tell me that this society has been hollowed out like a husk at every level—private and public; local, state and federal—by statist social engineering? And so, once again, we were right to call Soto so-and-so a mediocrity, a product of racial set-asides. It’s all so very shocking. You want to add Larry Auster’s analysis to the specter of Soto admitting that her test scores left much to be desired. (On the bright side, perhaps a dim liberal bulb will do less damage as one of America’s new black-robed deities):

Update: “Her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.”

“Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that, to get up to speed on her English skills at Princeton, Sotomayor was advised to read children’s classics and study basic grammar
books during her summers. How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your summer reading consists of ‘Chicken Little’ and ‘The Troll Under the Bridge’?” …

“Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review – all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.”

“… were it not for Ivy League dishonesty, Sotomayor would not have gotten into Princeton, would never have been ranked first in her class, would not have gotten into Yale Law, nor been named editor of Yale Law Review, and thus would not be a U.S. appellate court judge today or a nominee to the Supreme Court.”

Who else but Pat Buchanan could deliver such masterstrokes? (Okay… I do quite well). The only facet Pat forgets to speak to: the loss of the importance of object, intellectual standards.

Not-So-Wise Latina

Debt, Ethics, Morality, The Courts

Sonia Sotomayor has a “fail” on FICO. Unless Barack has intervened, her credit score is probably abysmal. How “wise” can this Latina lady be if she’s financially reckless? Moreover, and with all the talk of her extraordinary empathic powers, The American Thinker wonders how Ms. Sotomayor will be capable of “empathizing” with “tens of millions of Americans who do have investments, 401Ks, and personal savings,” since “after so many years of highly paid professional work, [she] has no savings or investments”:

“Sotomayor’s annual earnings come to $196,000 a year ($170,000 a year as an appeals judge and $26,000 for part-time teaching). She has served as an appeals judge for 17 years. This service was preceded by lengthy tenure at a corporate law firm of Pavia and Harcourt, where she was a partner, and presumably was well compensated.

Yet after a career that has spanned 25 years, Ms Sotomayor only has one thousand dollars in net savings. As reported in the New York Post, Sotomayor’s bank account holds $31,985. Her credit cards debts are $15,823, and she has $15,000 in unpaid dental bills. That leaves her with $1,162. Sotomayor’s total assets, revealed as $708,068, consist almost entirely of equity in her Manhattan apartment. The judge’s financial filing does not disclose what percentage of this figure is unrealized gain, but it must be sizable. In other words, other than home equity, Ms Sotomayor is essentially broke.”

Update III: BAB’s Pick For The Supreme Court

Constitution, Feminism, Gender, Law, libertarianism, Liberty, Neoconservatism, Race, Reason, The Courts

Who said the following: “Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free stuff’ as the political system will permit them to extract”? Answer: Justice Janice Rogers Brown, the black, conservative judge Bush passed-up on nominating for the SCOTUS. This is just one of Brown’s many just utterances. At the time, President Bush’s lickspittles refused to concede that he too considered Rogers Brown “outside the mainstream,” to use the Democrats’ line.

By now you’ve heard that the president intends to nominate Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court. The Sotomayor quotes making the rounds on the blogs are:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. … Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

Janice Brown quotes … Thucydides, F.A. Hayek, and Burke. That’s so white male, so yesterday; so wrong.

Well, King Obama did say he was looking for “empathy” in a nominee, also “code for injecting liberal ideology into the law.

Race hustler the Rev. Al Sharpton “called the choice ‘prudent’ and “groundbreaking.'”

Just in case anyone’s taken in by the Republicans’ new-found fidelity for the Constitution, Liz Cheney babbled on FoxNew about the wonders of the shattered glass ceiling, adding a couple of Constitutional caveats with respect to the impending shoo-in. It’s hard to keep up with these shifty neocons.

Update I:In “The Case Against Sotomayor,” Jeffrey Rosen, legal affairs editor at The New Republic, confirms, indirectly, what we’ve all known all along: 1) If a candidate is a minority with degrees from the Ivy League, then he or she is invariably a mediocrity. 2) Obama, who’s married to a woman of this class, is also wedded to entrenching her ilk everywhere. 3) Don’t forget that Bush’s goofy Harriet Myers had neither the required education, experience, or intellect.

Writes Rosen:

“The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was ‘not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,’ as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. ‘She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.’ (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, ‘Will you please stop talking and let them talk?’) Second Circuit judge Jose Cabranes, who would later become her colleague, put this point more charitably in a 1995 interview with The New York Times: ‘She is not intimidated or overwhelmed by the eminence or power or prestige of any party, or indeed of the media.’

Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It’s customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn’t distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions–fixing typos and the like–rather than focusing on the core analytical issues.

Some former clerks and prosecutors expressed concerns about her command of technical legal details: In 2001, for example, a conservative colleague, Ralph Winter, included an unusual footnote in a case suggesting that an earlier opinion by Sotomayor might have inadvertently misstated the law in a way that misled litigants. The most controversial case in which Sotomayor participated is Ricci v. DeStefano, the explosive case involving affirmative action in the New Haven fire department, which is now being reviewed by the Supreme Court. A panel including Sotomayor ruled against the firefighters in a perfunctory unpublished opinion. This provoked Judge Cabranes, a fellow Clinton appointee, to object to the panel’s opinion that contained ‘no reference whatsoever to the constitutional issues at the core of this case.’ (The extent of Sotomayor’s involvement in the opinion itself is not publicly known.)”

Update II (May 27): I find the media’s judicial jiu-jitsu absolutely unconscionable. I think they don’t know what they do, so corrupt are they. Instead of reporting the record of Sotomayor, good and bad, the menagerie of morons that is the American media has taken on the construction of a meta-argument against the GOP’s yet-to-be-made case against Sotomayor, if you get my drift. This time, the media morons are doing Obama’s bidding in the most subtle of ways.

This is the argument issuing equally from MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell as well as from the lowliest Democratic strategist: Republicans cannot oppose Sotomayor without risking the ire of Hispanics, which they need to court in order to avoid death by demographics. In one fell swoop, and contrary to the mandate of journalism, the Obama media has established two, allegedly incontrovertible truths:

1) That the GOP’s appeal is altered by Hispanics. As far as I can tell, the GOP has never enjoyed even the tentative support of Hispanics.
2) The GOP needs Hispanics to stay alive. That’s like saying that an anaerobic organism needs oxygen to survive. Sure, he can handle oxygen; but does he need it to live? Hardly.

Watch and see: now the media, always slightly smarter than the Republicans, will have the latter twisting like Cirque du Soleil contortionists, so as to, 1) appease and court Hispanics. 2) Do the diversity dance. 3) Water-down a substantive critique of Sotomayor.

Mission accomplished.

Update III (May 28): As someone who has written on anti-trust, and understands the issues, I find this article highlighting Justice Brown’s misapprehension of one such case, smarmy in the extreme — and typical of the apples oranges error, to say nothing of the fanaticism found in so many libertarian quarters. From the fact that Brown does not adhere to my own purist understanding of anti-trust legislation — an understanding that is quite radical—I must conclude that she is an enemy of property? Are you nuts?!

This is a childish tantrum aimed, not at reasoned argument, but at displaying the writer’s rad credentials. It is, moreover, a disingenuous diatribe because intellectually dishonest; it ignores that there is a debate about anti-trust among freedom-loving intellectuals.

The same case can be made with respect to a judge who enforces patent and copyright law. I vehemently disagree with this branch of the law, but for me to pretend there is not a vigorous debate among libertarians about copyright and patent law would be worse than intellectually dishonest; it would be shameful.

Ultimately, if you can’t distinguish a patriot like Brown from a Sotomayor, well then, you deserve to labor under a statist, old succubus such as Sotomayor — literally.

I’m trying to keep it real, here.

Update III: BAB's Pick For The Supreme Court

Constitution, Feminism, Gender, Law, libertarianism, Liberty, Neoconservatism, Race, Reason, The Courts

Who said the following: “Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free stuff’ as the political system will permit them to extract”? Answer: Justice Janice Rogers Brown, the black, conservative judge Bush passed-up on nominating for the SCOTUS. This is just one of Brown’s many just utterances. At the time, President Bush’s lickspittles refused to concede that he too considered Rogers Brown “outside the mainstream,” to use the Democrats’ line.

By now you’ve heard that the president intends to nominate Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court. The Sotomayor quotes making the rounds on the blogs are:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. … Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

Janice Brown quotes … Thucydides, F.A. Hayek, and Burke. That’s so white male, so yesterday; so wrong.

Well, King Obama did say he was looking for “empathy” in a nominee, also “code for injecting liberal ideology into the law.

Race hustler the Rev. Al Sharpton “called the choice ‘prudent’ and “groundbreaking.'”

Just in case anyone’s taken in by the Republicans’ new-found fidelity for the Constitution, Liz Cheney babbled on FoxNew about the wonders of the shattered glass ceiling, adding a couple of Constituional caveats with respect to the impending shoo-in. It’s hard to keep up with these shifty neocons.

Update I:In “The Case Against Sotomayor,” Jeffrey Rosen, legal affairs editor at The New Republic, confirms, indirectly, what we’ve all known all along: 1) If a candidate is a minority with degrees from the Ivy League, then he or she is invariably a mediocrity. 2) Obama, who’s married to a woman of this class, is also wedded to entrenching her ilk everywhere. 3) Don’t forget that Bush’s goofy Harriet Myers had neither the required education, experience, or intellect.

Writes Rosen:

“The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was ‘not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,’ as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. ‘She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.’ (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, ‘Will you please stop talking and let them talk?’) Second Circuit judge Jose Cabranes, who would later become her colleague, put this point more charitably in a 1995 interview with The New York Times: ‘She is not intimidated or overwhelmed by the eminence or power or prestige of any party, or indeed of the media.’

Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It’s customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn’t distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions–fixing typos and the like–rather than focusing on the core analytical issues.

Some former clerks and prosecutors expressed concerns about her command of technical legal details: In 2001, for example, a conservative colleague, Ralph Winter, included an unusual footnote in a case suggesting that an earlier opinion by Sotomayor might have inadvertently misstated the law in a way that misled litigants. The most controversial case in which Sotomayor participated is Ricci v. DeStefano, the explosive case involving affirmative action in the New Haven fire department, which is now being reviewed by the Supreme Court. A panel including Sotomayor ruled against the firefighters in a perfunctory unpublished opinion. This provoked Judge Cabranes, a fellow Clinton appointee, to object to the panel’s opinion that contained ‘no reference whatsoever to the constitutional issues at the core of this case.’ (The extent of Sotomayor’s involvement in the opinion itself is not publicly known.)”

Update II (May 27): I find the media’s judicial jiu-jitsu absolutely unconscionable. I think they don’t know what they do, so corrupt are they. Instead of reporting the record of Sotomayor, good and bad, the menagerie of morons that is the American media has taken on the construction of a meta-argument against the GOP’s yet-to-be-made case against Sotomayor, if you get my drift. This time, the media morons are doing Obama’s bidding in the most subtle of ways.

This is the argument issuing equally from MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell as well as from the lowliest Democratic strategist: Republicans cannot oppose Sotomayor without risking the ire of Hispanics, which they need to court in order to avoid death by demographics. In one fell swoop, and contrary to the mandate of journalism, the Obama media has established two, allegedly incontrovertible truths:

1) That the GOP’s appeal is altered by Hispanics. As far as I can tell, the GOP has never enjoyed even the tentative support of Hispanics.
2) The GOP needs Hispanics to stay alive. That’s like saying that an anaerobic organism needs oxygen to survive. Sure, he can handle oxygen; but does he need it to live? Hardly.

Watch and see: now the media, always slightly smarter than the Republicans, will have the latter twisting like Cirque du Soleil contortionists, so as to, 1) appease and court Hispanics. 2) Do the diversity dance. 3) Water-down a substantive critique of Sotomayor.

Mission accomplished.

Update III (May 28): As someone who has written on anti-trust, and understands the issues, I find this article highlighting Justice Brown’s misapprehension of one such case, smarmy in the extreme — and typical of the apples oranges error, to say nothing of the fanaticism found in so many libertarian quarters. From the fact that Brown does not adhere to my own purist understanding of anti-trust legislation — an understanding that is quite radical—I must conclude that she is an enemy of property? Are you nuts?!

This is a childish tantrum aimed, not at reasoned argument, but at displaying the writer’s rad credentials. It is, moreover, a disingenuous diatribe because intellectually dishonest; it ignores that there is a debate about anti-trust among freedom-loving intellectuals.

The same case can be made with respect to a judge who enforces patent and copyright law. I vehemently disagree with this branch of the law, but for me to pretend there is not a vigorous debate among libertarians about copyright and patent law would be worse than intellectually dishonest; it would be shameful.

Ultimately, if you can’t distinguish a patriot like Brown from a Sotomayor, well then, you deserve to labor under a statist, old succubus such as Sotomayor — literally.

I’m trying to keep it real, here.