Commentary: What the 'wise Latina' remark meant

[babylonsister]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/14/gomez.supreme.court/index.html

Commentary: What the 'wise Latina' remark meant

By Laura E. Gómez
Special to CNN

Editor's note: Laura Gómez is professor of law and American studies at the University of New Mexico. Gómez, who has a Ph.D. in sociology and a law degree from Stanford University, is the author of "Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race."

snip//

I was a speaker at the conference Sotomayor's speech kicked off, and I would like to put her comment in context.

Entitled "Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation," the conference brought together -- for the first time, to my knowledge -- judges, lawyers, scholars and law students to consider the state of Latinos in the judiciary.

By 2050, Hispanics will be 30 percent of the U.S. population, and yet the number of Latino judges remains tiny. The number of female Hispanic judges is even smaller; Sotomayor is one of two Hispanic women among federal appellate judges, and there are not much more than that among the hundreds of federal district judges.

Part of the impetus for the conference was to signal the potential crisis for our courts in the 21st century if we do not get more Latino lawyers interested in becoming judges and more appointed to the bench.

In this context, I did not find Sotomayor's comment controversial. As I look at the speech eight years later, I'm struck by how measured and careful she was in making the claim.

First, the sentence I have quoted here followed Sotomayor's acknowledgement that there is no universal definition of "wise."

Second, she presented the statement as aspirational by using the phrase "I would hope"; she was talking as much about the ideal of diversity as its reality.

Third, she specified that she was talking not about all Latinas and all white men but about ideal types; she invoked a "wise" Hispanic woman who has had a particular set of life experiences and white male judges who have not "lived that life" (suggesting that some white males could, in fact, bring a similar empathy and/or life experience to the bench).

Fourth, she went out of her way to say that she thought this would be the case "more often than not," rather than all the time.

Finally, in the next sentence of her speech, Sotomayor went on to specify that she was addressing the dynamics of an appellate court with multiple judges (such as the three-judge and en banc panels on which she sits as an appeals court judge and the Supreme Court), rather than talking about a trial court context in which a single judge presides.

snip//

At the end of the day, a judge's race and gender may have less impact on how she decides a particular case than how the larger public perceives the court on which she sits. In a society in which African-Americans and Hispanics, in particular, report high rates of dissatisfaction and lack of faith in the courts and other criminal justice institutions, the racial and gender makeup of the judiciary has greater relevance.

Of 111 Supreme Court justices, all but four have been white men. It's past time the nation's highest court looked more like the nation.

[Daveparts]

1. It means that

She voted with Conservative Judges 97% of the time. She's wise alright!

[babylonsister]

2. Oh boy. That's not what her comment meant at all. So sorry you've

got tunnel vision.

[Demeter]

3. It Ought to Mean Are You Smarter Than a WMXtian White Supremacist?

answer--just about anybody else would be....