Sotomayor Shows Precision in Areas of Civil Rights and Constitutional Protections

Today, Alliance for Justice released the last in a series of in-depth reports examining the record of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. During a press briefing on the report, Vanderbilt Associate Law Professor and Hispanics for a Fair Judiciary member Terry Maroney summed up Sotomayor’s style by stating, “What comes through loud and clear is that she takes a scalpel approach rather than a hammer approach resulting in absolute precision.” Speaking about the recently decided Ricci case, AFJ Legal Director Bill Yeomans clarified that “the Supreme Court decision in Ricci created a new standard that Sotomayor could not have applied previously as a circuit court judge.”

Over the last month, AFJ has released a new report each week, providing thorough analysis of key areas of Judge Sotomayor’s record. You can read all of the reports on our Supreme Court Watch page. This final report focuses on civil rights and constitutional protections, finding that similar to the rest of her record Sotomayor is “a model of judicial restraint, acutely and openly conscious of the limits imposed by her role as a judge.”

Sotomayor Hearing Set for July 13

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced today that the confirmation hearings to consider the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to be an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court will begin on July 13, 2009. Judge Sotomayor returned the Committee's bipartisan questionnaire on June 4. The questionnaire and attachments are available online. The date of the hearings is consistent with the average timeline for a Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation process, and should allow Judge Sotomayor to be confirmed in time for the start of next year’s Supreme Court term which begins in October.

Yesterday we released the first in a series of in-depth reports on Judge Sotomayor’s record. Alliance for Justice will release a new report a week leading up to the hearing, providing thorough analysis of key areas of Judge Sotomayor’s record: access to justice, criminal law, civil rights, constitutional law and business and consumer law. The first report on access to justice is available on our Supreme Court Watch page.

Battle for the Courts

Alliance for Justice co-sponsored a panel at today’s America’s Future Now conference on the importance of the courts. Nan Aron, President of AFJ introduced the session by reminding the audience that while the nomination of Sotomayor is an historic, ground breaking event, that is just the beginning.

Hundreds of federal judges will be appointed during the Obama administration. We have to take this opportunity to start the conversation that has long been denied about the role of courts and judges in America. President Obama has expressed his intent to raise the level of that conversation above the empty rhetoric of “judicial activism’ and ‘legislating from the bench.”

Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing will start that process. But it is up to us to urge the Obama administration to appoint judges who will uphold the Constitution’s promise of equal justice for all.

Learn more about the Supreme Court and Judge Sonia Sotomayor on our Supreme Court Watch page.

Justice the Video

The Coalition for Constitutional Values, a national coalition of the nation’s leading nonprofit and advocacy organizations, announced today that it will begin airing “Justice” a new 30-second television spot that will run on national network news and cable news starting today. The Coalition for Constitutional Values, whose members represent millions of Americans, believes it is important that the American people know about the qualities of their Supreme Court justices.

The new spot is part of a broader public education campaign launched by the Coalition for Constitutional Values, co-chaired by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Alliance for Justice and People for the American Way. The Coalition hopes the spot will introduce the American public to Judge Sotomayor who has experience in nearly every aspect of the law, having served as a big-city prosecutor and a corporate litigator, a federal trial judge and an appellate judge.

"In selecting Judge Sotomayor, the president has nominated a candidate of sterling credentials who will uphold the Constitution and the law,” said Nan Aron, co-chair of the Coalition for Constitutional Values and president of Alliance for Justice. “We commend President Obama for choosing a brilliant and fair-minded jurist to serve on our nation’s highest court. Judge Sotomayor is precisely the kind of nominee we need – one who, as President Obama described, ‘has the intellectual firepower but also a little bit of a common touch and has a practical sense of how the world works.’”

Watch the video and learn more on our Supreme Court Watch Page.