President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, is being attacked for what her opponents are characterizing as a judicial activism based on gender and race. Much of that criticism comes from a line I’ve seen floating around the media, Sotomayor’s declaration that, “I 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.”
Turns out that line comes from a speech Sotomayor gave a few years back, the Judge Mario G. Olmos Law & Cultural Diversity Memorial Lecture at Berkeley Law, which was published in the spring 2002 edition of the La Raza Law Journal (13 La Raza L.J. 87). Here is a link to that speech, which puts the above quote in context.
I'm not sure that a reading in context changes my opinion of the statement especially considering her judicial record. But I will say that some of the things she says here are not unreasonable. The statement actually seems out of place in the whole argument. Dead in the middle of an argument for the value of diversity she plainly states that her opinion is of greater real value than that of a white man due specifically to her race and gender. Does that make here a racist? No probably not. It makes her a bit ineloquent, but I can't criticize on that basis.