“Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

“However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

The whole speech is available here.

It makes me think all the more that Sotomayor is a postmodernist of sorts.

One more point, at the risk of sounding like a eurocentric conservative crank. George Will makes this point in his current column:
“Imagine the reaction if someone had unearthed in 2005 a speech in which then-Judge Samuel Alito had asserted, for example: ‘I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life’ — and had proceeded to speak of ‘inherent physiological or cultural differences.’ ”

Really, can you imagine?! Would we be explaining the comment away by placing it in context, etc etc? I rather doubt it. Instead he would have been absolutely crucified for it, it would have been regarded as an absolutely unforgivable remark, and he’d be dead on arrival when it came to confirmation. You can defend just about anything these days, so long as you do not defend the West.

On the other hand, “objectivity” is often placed before us by conservative critics of the Sotomayor nomination, as the ultimate characteristic of a judge. I will not argue from a philosophical perspective whether objectivity really exists. I’ll accept dispassionate reasoning (neutrality?) as another useful tool for a judge. Again, it is only one tool.

Truthfully, law is about ANALYZING and INTERPRETING texts like the U. S. Constitution. Only adherents of Natural Law believe that legal truth can be known without interpretation of texts. Interpretation is a task that requires many human faculties. If objectivity were the only required skill, then the best judge would be someone who had never lived in the world, someone who had been locked in a closet somewhere with nothing but food, drink, and the legal texts themselves. “Please interpret these laws with no outside input whatsoever.” That’s an absurdity. Interpretation of law ALWAYS involves knowledge of the texts AND the world in which they were composed.

However, I do not understand how compassion factors into cases involving the constitution. Supreme Court cases concern constitutional issues. The decisions made there effect generations of Americans.