Sonia Sotomayor Is a National Treasure

[DonViejo]

'The Sotomayor Style' is how America should talk about fairness

BY DAVID FONTANA

This year marks the fifth anniversary of Sonia Sotomayor becoming a Justice on the United States Supreme Court. On Tuesday, Sotomayor dissented from the court’s decision upholding a state constitutional initiative in Michigan that would prohibit the use of race-based affirmative action in admission to Michigan public universities. Decades from now, because of her dissent, we might look back on Tuesday as the day she really arrived on the court.

In my earlier writing for this magazine and in a recent symposium essay for The Yale Law Journal, I argued that Sotomayor, uniquely among recent liberal justices, has used her public appearances to effectively communicate her liberal perspective on the constitution to regular members of the public, in addition to legal and academic elites. Tuesday featured something related, but new for her: Sotomayor’s dissent suggests that she can uniquely communicate with the regular public via her written opinions as well. Let’s call this the “Sotomayor Style,” and for liberals it could be strategically significant.

Consider this language from Sotomayor’s dissent, which is so unusually compelling in its simplicity in describing the daily experiences of millions of Americans:

Race matters to a young man’s view of society when he spends his teenage years watching others tense up as he passes, no matter the neighborhood where he grows up. Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, “No, where are you really from,” regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country. Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home. Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: “I do not belong here.”

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117501/sonia-sotomayor-schuette-dissent-national-treasure?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=margin&utm_campaign=mostpopular

[frazzled]

1. Yes she is ...

and I will count her in to the list of lasting achievements of this administration, which includes the Affordable Care Act, civil rights for gay Americans, financial regulations in Dodd-Frank, among others. We'll tot up the plusses and minuses ten or fifteen years from now in judging, but I'm sure Sotomayor will remain in the plus column.

[northoftheborder]

2. Yes, yes.

[redqueen]

3. K&fuckinR