Sonia_SotomayorWASHINGTON, D.C. – National attention today will be on two supreme courts, which, though separated by a continent, will each become the focus of intense political discussion throughout the week.

In the nation’s capital, President Barack Obama Tuesday morning nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor (pictured) to replace Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. Later the same morning, the California Supreme Court will announce its decision regarding the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the November ballot measure that resurrected a ban on same-sex marriage in the state.


Sotomayor, 54, currently sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A graduate of Princeton (B.A., 1976) and the Yale Law School (1979), Sotomayor was nominated to the federal bench in 1991 by George H. W. Bush and then promoted by President Bill Clinton in 1997 to the Appeals Court where she now sits. Her confirmation for the Appeals court took a year, with a majority of Republican senators voting against her.

Politically, the right wing already is gearing up for a fight over the nomination, mostly over comments she made in 2001 at a U.C. Berkeley symposium that seemed to suggest a bias against while males.

“Our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging,” she said. “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 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 experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Stuart Taylor took Sotomayor to task for those remarks in the National Journal, calling her thinking “representative of the Democratic Party’s powerful identity-politics wing.”

Sotomayor also has received criticism for a recent Affimative Action decision that is being reviwed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Sotomayor was part of a three-judge panel that ruled in February 2008 to uphold a lower court decision supporting the City of New Haven’s decision to throw out the results of an exam to determine promotions within the city’s fire department. Taylor, for one, called the ruling “raw racial discrimination.”

On the other side, Sotomayor’s supporters will point to the fact that, if confirmed, she would bring more federal judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any justice in 100 years and more overall judicial experience than anyone confirmed for the Court in the past 70 years. They also will reference her experience as a big-city prosecutor and a corporate litigator, a federal trial judge on the U.S. District Court and an appellate judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as the fact that she is a woman, a Latina, a Catholic, and a product of New York public housing and schooling.

At 10 a.m. (PST), the California Supreme Court will announce its ruling regarding the consitutionality of Proposition 8, the iniative that overturned the court’s May 2008 ruled that found the 2000 state law banning same-sex marriage discriminatory. Today, the court can render three possible rulings:

  • Proposition 8 is unconstitutional and therefore same sex marriage is again legal.
  • Proposition 8 is constitutional, but the 18,000 same sex marriages conducted prior to the November vote are still valid.
  • Proposition 8 is constitutional and those 18,000 same sex marriages are now void.

Most legal experts believe the court will sustain Prop 8., but no one seems to be making a bet on how the court will rule with respect to the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed in California between June and Novemner of last year.