Blind justice not just a slogan

Inter Lake editorial

The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor might well be a sure thing, but we are by no means sure that it should be.

Here's why: The most significant aspect of work on the Supreme Court is the ability to assess questions of law impartially. As the final appellate court, the Supreme Court rules on whether lower courts have correctly applied the law, not on whether the decision benefits the "right" party. Oftentimes in judicial decisions, a party which is morally right is legally wrong. This is why we as a society insist that justice is blind; the courts often must make hard decisions that adversely affect good people or, conversely, benefit people of ill repute.

However, despite Sotomayor's many personal accomplishments and career successes, she has raised considerable doubts about her ability to impartially and blindly interpret the law.

In particular, she has been called to task for her statement that she "would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

That is certainly dangerous territory for a judge. Obviously, it would be unacceptable for a white male nominee to say that he hoped "a wise Anglo man with the richness of his experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn't lived that life." If a nominee said that in his or her confirmation hearing, the president would pull the plug by the end of the day.

But supporters of Judge Sotomayor don't seem to mind her saying what she did. They claim it was taken out of context, but of course it wasn't. In the same 2001 speech at a symposium co-sponsored by the La Raza Law Journal, she questions whether it is even possible for judges to "transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices." She also contends that "our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging" and that "personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see."

She may be right about all of that, but her job as a Supreme Court justice would be to throw out rulings where judges had let their "personal experiences affect the facts' of the case, not to blithely accommodate such foolishness.

And ironically, there is a case before the Supreme Court right now, Ricci vs. DeStefano, which provides a window into the kind of chaos that is caused when an appellate judge uses "personal sympathies' to decide a case. In this case, three judges from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that the city of New Haven and Mayor DeStefano were justified in refusing to hire firefighter officers because no one who passed the tests to measure knowledge of firefighting procedures was black. The city wanted to hire a mix of black and white people, so it decided not to hire anyone instead, leaving the best-qualified candidates out of luck.

Sadly, Judge Sotomayor was one of the three judges who said it is acceptable to discriminate against qualified applicants just because of the color of their skin.

We don't know about Judge Sotomayor, but we would rather have firefighters hired based on their skills and knowledge, not their skin color - and for that matter, we would rather have judges hired for the same reason.