The selection has been made and the debate is underway. Until her Senate confirmation, Sonya Sotomayor, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, is under fire. As the first Latina and third woman ever to be nominated for the bench, Sotomayor represents great progress, both for the legal profession and for American politics alike. However, some have questioned whether it was truly her merits and not just her demographics that earned her this nomination.

Conservatives, who are aiming to unearth anything and everything that might prove her unsuitable, have recently focused on a 2001 speech delivered right here on the UC Berkeley campus. In this speech entitled “A Latina Judge’s Voice”, Sotomayor declared that she “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”.  According to Obama, “She was simply saying that her life experiences will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people are going through…that will make her a good judge”. However, some see this as blatant reverse discrimination, epitomized by Patrick J. Buchanan’s comment in the SF Chronicle:

“Imagine if Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has said at Bob Jones University, ‘I would hope that a wise white male with the richness of his life experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Hispanic woman, who hasn’t lived that life.’ Alito would have been toast.”

Regardless of your stance on Sotomayor, it is hard to brush her aside as a mere token minority in light of her impressive story: a daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, raised in a Bronx housing project, who went to Princeton, then Yale Law, where she was Editor of the Law Review before her eventual appointment to the 2^nd Circuit Federal Court of Appeals.  Perhaps she truly does have it all.

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