Quezi

The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. Dbking photo. CC-BY

Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s choice to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, has been widely reported to have said that Latina judges make better decisions than white males do, and some of her harshest critics have even called her racist as a result. However, is that what she actually said?

The most complete answer can be found by reading the exact words of her comment in context, which was a 2001 speech she gave to a symposium at UC Berkeley in 2001. Any objective reading of her speech suggests that she didn’t take the position that judges who fit her demographics are necessarily better judges than those who don’t. In fact, she said little different than what Justice Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush nominee, said in his confirmation hearing:

It’s not my job to change the law or to bend the law to achieve any result. But … [w]hen I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account. When I have a case involving someone who’s been subjected to discrimination because of disability, I have to think of people who I’ve known and admire very greatly who’ve had disabilities, and I’ve watched them struggle to overcome the barriers that society puts up often just because it doesn’t think of what it’s doing — the barriers that it puts up to them.

Like Alito’s, Sotomayor’s point in her now-controversial remarks (which went unnoticed at the time) was that judges bring their backgrounds to their positions. That’s not because they are inherently better, but because they may see facts that others different backgrounds don’t see.

Here are Sotomayor’s exact words that have come to haunt her:

[O]ur gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, 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.

But she immediately tempered those remarks with other observations:

I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown. However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

To me, it seems that Sotomayor said why any honest judge would say: While it is my duty to uphold the law and I will do so, because of my background and experiences, I will see things differently than other people do. And for some cases, that may make me better suited to understand the situation of the parties involved.

Sotomayor’s comments, seen in context, were far more nuanced — and benign — than her opponents are claiming. Fortunately, in today’s Internet age, you can read her complete speech and judge for yourself.