In 2001, Sonia Sotomayor gave the keynote speech at “a symposium commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first judicial appointment of a Latino to a federal district court.” The text of the speech was later published in the La Raza Law Journal.
I’m posting the full speech (even though it may be a copyright violation) because I think it’s important, since Sotomayor’s views on being a Latina Judge will probably be much discussed over the next couple of weeks, that people have the opportunity to read her own words in full.
Here’s an excerpt; the full speech is after the jump.
Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. 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 not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. 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 experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
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 full speech can be read under the fold.
RAISING THE BAR: LATINO AND LATINA PRESENCE IN THE JUDICIARY AND THE STRUGGLE FOR REPRESENTATION: JUDGE MARIO G. OLMOS MEMORIAL LECTURE: Latina Judge’s Voice
Judge Reynoso, thank you for that lovely introduction. I am humbled to be speaking behind a man who has contributed so much to the Hispanic community. I am also grateful to have such kind words said about me.
I am delighted to be here. It is nice to escape my hometown for just a little bit. It is also nice to say hello to old friends who are in the audience, to rekindle contact with old acquaintances and to make new friends among those of you in the audience. It is particularly heart warming to me to be attending a conference to which I was invited by a Latina law school friend, Rachel Moran, who is now an accomplished and widely respected legal scholar. I warn Latinos in this room: Latinas are making a lot of progress in the old-boy network.
I am also deeply honored to have been asked to deliver the annual Judge Mario G. Olmos lecture. I am joining a remarkable group of prior speakers who have given this lecture. I hope what I speak about today continues to promote the legacy of that man whose commitment to public service and abiding dedication to promoting equality and justice for all people inspired this memorial lecture and the conference that will follow. I thank Judge Olmos’ widow Mary Louise’s family, her son and the judge’s many friends for hosting me. And for the privilege you have bestowed on me in honoring the memory of a very special person. If I and the many people of this conference can accomplish a fraction of what Judge Olmos did in his short but extraordinary life we and our respective communities will be infinitely better.
I intend tonight to touch upon the themes that this conference will be discussing this weekend and to talk to you about my Latina identity, where it came from, and the influence I perceive it has on my presence on the bench.
Who am I? I am a “Newyorkrican.” For those of you on the West Coast who do not know what that term means: I am a born and bred New Yorker of Puerto Rican-born parents who came to the states during World War II.
Like many other immigrants to this great land, my parents came because of poverty and to attempt to find and secure a better life for themselves and the family that they hoped to have. They largely succeeded. For that, my brother and I are very grateful. The story of that success is what made me and what makes me the Latina that I am. The Latina side of my identity was forged and closely nurtured by my family through our shared experiences and traditions.
For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir – rice, beans and pork – that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events. My Latina identity also includes, because of my particularly adventurous taste buds, morcilla, — pig intestines, patitas de cerdo con garbanzo — pigs’ feet with beans, and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito, pigs’ tongue and ears. I bet the Mexican-Americans in this room are thinking that Puerto Ricans have unusual food tastes. Some of us, like me, do. Part of my Latina identity is the sound of merengue at all our family parties and the heart wrenching Spanish love songs that we enjoy. It is the memory of Saturday afternoon at the movies with my aunt and cousins watching Cantinflas, who is not Puerto Rican, but who was an icon Spanish comedian on par with Abbot and Costello of my generation. My Latina soul was nourished as I visited and played at my grandmother’s house with my cousins and extended family. They were my friends as I grew up. Being a Latina child was watching the adults playing dominos on Saturday night and us kids playing loteria, bingo, with my grandmother calling out the numbers which we marked on our cards with chick peas.
Now, does any one of these things make me a Latina? Obviously not because each of our Carribean and Latin American communities has their own unique food and different traditions at the holidays. I only learned about tacos in college from my Mexican-American roommate. Being a Latina in America also does not mean speaking Spanish. I happen to speak it fairly well. But my brother, only three years younger, like too many of us educated here, barely speaks it. Most of us born and bred here, speak it very poorly.
If I had pursued my career in my undergraduate history major, I would likely provide you with a very academic description of what being a Latino or Latina means. For example, I could define Latinos as those peoples and cultures populated or colonized by Spain who maintained or adopted Spanish or Spanish Creole as their language of communication. You can tell that I have been very well educated. That antiseptic description however, does not really explain the appeal of morcilla – pig’s intestine – to an American born child. It does not provide an adequate explanation of why individuals like us, many of whom are born in this completely different American culture, still identify so strongly with those communities in which our parents were born and raised.
America has a deeply confused image of itself that is in perpetual tension. We are a nation that takes pride in our ethnic diversity, recognizing its importance in shaping our society and in adding richness to its existence. Yet, we simultaneously insist that we can and must function and live in a race and color-blind way that ignore these very differences that in other contexts we laud. That tension between “the melting pot and the salad bowl” — a recently popular metaphor used to described New York’s diversity – is being hotly debated today in national discussions about affirmative action. Many of us struggle with this tension and attempt to maintain and promote our cultural and ethnic identities in a society that is often ambivalent about how to deal with its differences. In this time of great debate we must remember that it is not political struggles that create a Latino or Latina identity. I became a Latina by the way I love and the way I live my life. My family showed me by their example how wonderful and vibrant life is and how wonderful and magical it is to have a Latina soul. They taught me to love being a Puerto Riqueña and to love America and value its lesson that great things could be achieved if one works hard for it. But achieving success here is no easy accomplishment for Latinos or Latinas, and although that struggle did not and does not create a Latina identity, it does inspire how I live my life.
I was born in the year 1954. That year was the fateful year in which Brown v. Board of Education was decided. When I was eight, in 1961, the first Latino, the wonderful Judge Reynaldo Garza, was appointed to the federal bench, an event we are celebrating at this conference. When I finished law school in 1979, there were no women judges on the Supreme Court or on the highest court of my home state, New York. There was then only one Afro-American Supreme Court Justice and then and now no Latino or Latina justices on our highest court. Now in the last twenty plus years of my professional life, I have seen a quantum leap in the representation of women and Latinos in the legal profession and particularly in the judiciary. In addition to the appointment of the first female United States Attorney General, Janet Reno, we have seen the appointment of two female justices to the Supreme Court and two female justices to the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court of my home state. One of those judges is the Chief Judge and the other is a Puerto Riqueña, like I am. As of today, women sit on the highest courts of almost all of the states and of the territories, including Puerto Rico. One Supreme Court, that of Minnesota, had a majority of women justices for a period of time.
As of September 1, 2001, the federal judiciary consisting of Supreme, Circuit and District Court Judges was about 22% women. In 1992, nearly ten years ago, when I was first appointed a District Court Judge, the percentage of women in the total federal judiciary was only 13%. Now, the growth of Latino representation is somewhat less favorable. As of today we have, as I noted earlier, no Supreme Court justices, and we have only 10 out of 147 active Circuit Court judges and 30 out of 587 active district court judges. Those numbers are grossly below our proportion of the population. As recently as 1965, however, the federal bench had only three women serving and only one Latino judge. So changes are happening, although in some areas, very slowly. These figures and appointments are heartwarming. Nevertheless, much still remains to happen.
Let us not forget that between the appointments of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981 and Justice Ginsburg in 1992, eleven years passed. Similarly, between Justice Kaye’s initial appointment as an Associate Judge to the New York Court of Appeals in 1983, and Justice Ciparick’s appointment in 1993, ten years elapsed. Almost nine years later, we are waiting for a third appointment of a woman to both the Supreme Court and the New York Court of Appeals and of a second minority, male or female, preferably Hispanic, to the Supreme Court. In 1992 when I joined the bench, there were still two out of 13 circuit courts and about 53 out of 92 district courts in which no women sat. At the beginning of September of 2001, there are women sitting in all 13 circuit courts. The First, Fifth, Eighth and Federal Circuits each have only one female judge, however, out of a combined total number of 48 judges. There are still nearly 37 district courts with no women judges at all. For women of color the statistics are more sobering. As of September 20, 1998, of the then 195 circuit court judges only two were African-American women and two Hispanic women. Of the 641 district court judges only twelve were African-American women and eleven Hispanic women. African-American women comprise only 1.56% of the federal judiciary and Hispanic-American women comprise only 1%. No African-American, male or female, sits today on the Fourth or Federal circuits. And no Hispanics, male or female, sit on the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, District of Columbia or Federal Circuits.
Sort of shocking, isn’t it? This is the year 2002. We have a long way to go. Unfortunately, there are some very deep storm warnings we must keep in mind. In at least the last five years the majority of nominated judges the Senate delayed more than one year before confirming or never confirming were women or minorities. I need not remind this audience that Judge Paez of your home Circuit, the Ninth Circuit, has had the dubious distinction of having had his confirmation delayed the longest in Senate history. These figures demonstrate that there is a real and continuing need for Latino and Latina organizations and community groups throughout the country to exist and to continue their efforts of promoting women and men of all colors in their pursuit for equality in the judicial system.
This weekend’s conference, illustrated by its name, is bound to examine issues that I hope will identify the efforts and solutions that will assist our communities. The focus of my speech tonight, however, is not about the struggle to get us where we are and where we need to go but instead to discuss with you what it all will mean to have more women and people of color on the bench. The statistics I have been talking about provide a base from which to discuss a question which one of my former colleagues on the Southern District bench, Judge Miriam Cederbaum, raised when speaking about women on the federal bench. Her question was: What do the history and statistics mean? In her speech, Judge Cederbaum expressed her belief that the number of women and by direct inference people of color on the bench, was still statistically insignificant and that therefore we could not draw valid scientific conclusions from the acts of so few people over such a short period of time. Yet, we do have women and people of color in more significant numbers on the bench and no one can or should ignore pondering what that will mean or not mean in the development of the law. Now, I cannot and do not claim this issue as personally my own. In recent years there has been an explosion of research and writing in this area. On one of the panels tomorrow, you will hear the Latino perspective in this debate.
For those of you interested in the gender perspective on this issue, I commend to you a wonderful compilation of articles published on the subject in Vol. 77 of the Judicature, the Journal of the American Judicature Society of November-December 1993. It is on Westlaw/Lexis and I assume the students and academics in this room can find it.
Now Judge Cedarbaum expresses concern with any analysis of women and presumably again people of color on the bench, which begins and presumably ends with the conclusion that women or minorities are different from men generally. She sees danger in presuming that judging should be gender or anything else based. She rightly points out that the perception of the differences between men and women is what led to many paternalistic laws and to the denial to women of the right to vote because we were described then “as not capable of reasoning or thinking logically” but instead of “acting intuitively.” I am quoting adjectives that were bandied around famously during the suffragettes’ movement.
While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law. Although I agree with and attempt to work toward Judge Cedarbaum’s aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases. And I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society. Whatever the reasons why we may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning, are in many respects a small part of a larger practical question we as women and minority judges in society in general must address. I accept the thesis of a law school classmate, Professor Steven Carter of Yale Law School, in his affirmative action book that in any group of human beings there is a diversity of opinion because there is both a diversity of experiences and of thought. Thus, as noted by another Yale Law School Professor — I did graduate from there and I am not really biased except that they seem to be doing a lot of writing in that area – Professor Judith Resnik says that there is not a single voice of feminism, not a feminist approach but many who are exploring the possible ways of being that are distinct from those structured in a world dominated by the power and words of men. Thus, feminist theories of judging are in the midst of creation and are not and perhaps will never aspire to be as solidified as the established legal doctrines of judging can sometimes appear to be.
That same point can be made with respect to people of color. No one person, judge or nominee will speak in a female or people of color voice. I need not remind you that Justice Clarence Thomas represents a part but not the whole of African-American thought on many subjects. Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, “to judge is an exercise of power” and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states “there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives – no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging,” I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that–it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging. The Minnesota Supreme Court has given an example of this. As reported by Judge Patricia Wald formerly of the D.C. Circuit Court, three women on the Minnesota Court with two men dissenting agreed to grant a protective order against a father’s visitation rights when the father abused his child. The Judicature Journal has at least two excellent studies on how women on the courts of appeal and state supreme courts have tended to vote more often than their male counterpart to uphold women’s claims in sex discrimination cases and criminal defendants’ claims in search and seizure cases. As recognized by legal scholars, whatever the reason, not one woman or person of color in any one position but as a group we will have an effect on the development of the law and on judging.
In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women. I recall that Justice Thurgood Marshall, Judge Connie Baker Motley, the first black woman appointed to the federal bench, and others of the NAACP argued Brown v. Board of Education. Similarly, Justice Ginsburg, with other women attorneys, was instrumental in advocating and convincing the Court that equality of work required equality in terms and conditions of employment.
Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. 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 not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. 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 experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
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.
I also hope that by raising the question today of what difference having more Latinos and Latinas on the bench will make will start your own evaluation. For people of color and women lawyers, what does and should being an ethnic minority mean in your lawyering? For men lawyers, what areas in your experiences and attitudes do you need to work on to make you capable of reaching those great moments of enlightenment which other men in different circumstances have been able to reach. For all of us, how do change the facts that in every task force study of gender and race bias in the courts, women and people of color, lawyers and judges alike, report in significantly higher percentages than white men that their gender and race has shaped their careers, from hiring, retention to promotion and that a statistically significant number of women and minority lawyers and judges, both alike, have experienced bias in the courtroom?
Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.
There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering. We, I mean all of us in this room, must continue individually and in voices united in organizations that have supported this conference, to think about these questions and to figure out how we go about creating the opportunity for there to be more women and people of color on the bench so we can finally have statistically significant numbers to measure the differences we will and are making.
I am delighted to have been here tonight and extend once again my deepest gratitude to all of you for listening and letting me share my reflections on being a Latina voice on the bench. Thank you.
Thanks for posting this — I was just reading it after seeing one sentence (“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”) being bandied about by conservatives as evidence that Sotomayor is racist.
I think it is difficult for some white men, particularly those who don’t expose themselves to PoC talking about their experiences, to understand that women generally get exposed to the male viewpoint more than vice versa, and PoC generally get exposed to the white viewpoint WAY more than vice versa. White and male (and straight) are the default identities of our culture, economy and law. A woman of color who has Ivy League degrees, has been a prosecutor and law firm partner, has been trained at least since high school to assimilate herself toward white maleness: to understand how white men frame their ideas, to voice her ideas so they’ll be acclaimed by white men, to behave and talk in ways that white men will approve by not noticing there’s any difference from how they themselves behave and talk.
In short, PoC usually do have a pretty good idea of what the white experience is. We are surrounded by it. Some of us are so assimilated that we might be better at articulating the white experience than that which is more typical of our own ethnic group.
In a sense, a minority who is successful in the mainstream (and being appointed or elected a judge usually constitutes success) has two experiences to apply when evaluating a case: the white experience that has been inculcated in her for years as the default of which she must be conscious, and her group’s experience that is what her own experience has been. In contrast, it’s rare for a white person — particularly one who has lived his entire life in upper middle class circumstances among other white people and not made any particular effort to understand a different life than that — to be carrying any experience other than his own alongside his own in his head.
I think there was a black writer, possibly James Baldwin, who said something like this as well; that the mainstream/default/white way of looking at and understanding things rides alongside in one’s head with the viewpoint developed from one’s own experiences, and that this could be really discombobulating if one didn’t recognize the two separate viewpoints and instead tried to shove one’s experiences into fitting into the white viewpoint. And this can be true for women as well if they try to push their experiences into the male viewpoint.
Yes, that. Nojojojo was saying to me this weekend that she reads with a white male gaze. And I think that’s true for a lot of people of color, and women, and straight people, and so on.
Carrying on with the discussion of things that aren’t fiction.
I think it’s important to note that Judge Sotomayor is responding in this speech to an essay/speech by Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, in which Judge Cedarbaum (as I recall) pretty stringently denied that being a minority in any way affected or should be thought to affect a judge. So there’s a bit of point-counterpoint going on here — it’s not that Judge Sotomayor jumped singlemindedly into this topic.
Somehow I knew “Alas” would be abuzz with Sotomayor and I didn’t want to miss out!
I think there are two ways in which being a minority should affect a judge — not at all, and in understanding disparate impact of the law. “Not at all” in the sense that no class should be “cut a break” just because they are a member of this class or that. Aware of “disparate impact” in the sense that laws may be facially neutral, but without the experience of being a member of a class that is adversely affected by this “facially neutral” law, there’s less potential for understanding that laws which appear to be neutral may be barriers to realizing ones rights.
For those interested in the essay by Judge Cederbaum that malathion mentions, which was published at 73 B.U.L. Rev. 39, here is the relevant portion:
I am finding that it seems to be ineradicably offensive to conservative and some purportedly liberal white men to suggest that unless they have been in a position either to experience being a subordinated group for a significant length of time*, or have made an effort to understand the experiences of such groups, they probably won’t know as much about other groups’ experiences as minorities generally do and thus don’t have as much practice in thinking outside their group’s experiences.
So I may have to give up trying to explain what Sotomayor was saying, because there doesn’t seem to be any way to put it that doesn’t sound to these folks like “She’s saying she’s better than I am because she’s Latina and I’m a white male.”
Sotomayor will just have to be resigned to being the Supreme Court justice who once acknowledged that life is different for the minority than the majority and then compounded the error by allowing her remarks to be published in a journal that had “La Raza” in its name. (Anything with “La Raza” in the name is about advocating retaking the Southwest U.S. for Latinos, donchaknow.)
* There are a few places in which white males aren’t necessarily at the top of the heap, such as Japan and other countries that did not have a colonial experience and that have been deemed “First World” for decades (just can’t think of any besides Japan to which that applies). White men there are still the first among the inferiors, but they lack some social privileges. I think a white male who has had to cope with that for a long time, not just as a tourist or student, might have built up some practice in being able to put himself in another’s shoes — which is what the whole empathy thing is about.
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
It might be that a Latina woman will reach a different conclusion in a given situation regarding treatment of minories, etc. than a white male would. I see no particular reason to presume that it would be a wiser one. I do think that it will be of value when the justices are in conference to have someone there with first-hand experience in certain things that others might lack.
However, there’s still the issue that the role of the courts is to rule on the basis of what the law is, not what it should be. If laws are in conflict, then the courts must make a decision as to which law is superior. But as we saw in the recent decision by the California Supreme Court with regards to Proposition 8 (and as explictly commented on in Dale vs. BSA, et. al.), if the laws are consistent the opinions of the members of the court as to whether the law is wrong must remain personal and not be expressed in the direction of their decision.
People have expressed predictable opinions as to how Judge Sotomayor acts in this regard. I’ll wait to see what comes out of the confirmation hearings before I make my own evaluation. I’ve heard that her decisions have been reversed a fair amount by the Supreme Court, which is not a good sign. But then people pick and choose these things, so let’s see.
May I direct you to this post?
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/washington-times-supremes-uphold.html
A little bit of research goes a long way in confirming or denying things we’ve heard and keeps us from perpetuating falsehoods.
RonF,
“I do think that it will be of value when the justices are in conference to have someone there with first-hand experience in certain things that others might lack.”
I think that like many conservatives, you are misunderstanding what the empathy point is about. As Sotomayor’s speech says, she is not basing her decisions on her own individual experiences; rather, those experiences gave her practice in having to think across lines of sex, race, language, etc. Being able to think of how a decision will affect someone different from oneself is what Obama was talking about with the importance of empathy.
My standard example here is Alito’s apparent inability to recognize, when Casey was before the 3rd Circuit, why it would be problematic to require women to notify their husbands before being able to obtain in abortion. He just could not seem to put himself in the shoes of a woman who is in the kind of situation where she wouldn’t want to tell her husband (since those women are the only ones affected by the law; it’s irrelevant to women who already were telling their husbands).
O’Connor’s opinion stands in great contrast to Alito’s. I have no reason to believe that O’Connor ever sought an abortion without telling her husband; they seem to have had a wonderful relationship and she left the Court in order to help care for him due to his Alzheimer’s. So it’s not that she is likely to have had the direct experience that is at issue in the case. Rather, she was able to imagine herself into the shoes of the woman who doesn’t want to tell her husband this.
Now, empathy doesn’t require one to come to a specific outcome. Look at Stevens’s opinion in Raich, the medical marijuana case, where he clearly feels very badly that cancer patients are subject to arrest under federal law for obtaining drugs that are permitted under state law. But he still decides that the interstate commerce clause does allow the federal government to regulate this matter, and that under the Supremacy Clause, federal law supersedes state law. He implies that the federal law should be changed to permit medical marijuana. But he still rules against Raich. Empathizing a great deal with someone doesn’t require you to rule in her favor; it does require you to think across the lines of experience to be aware of the practical effect of your legal decision will have on people in a situation different from your own.
Contrast Stevens’s opinion with Scalia’s concurrence (O’Connor, Thomas, Rehnquist all dissented), in which Scalia doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the cancer patients at all. Which is not to say that Scalia is incapable of empathy; I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him worrying over the practical effects of legal decisions on employers and business owners, for example where a statute is ambiguous about the level of accommodation required for people with disabilities.
Ideally, an empathetic justice should be aware of the practical effects on both sides; in deciding how much accommodation is “reasonable,” the justice must consider both the life of the disable person and the budget of a business or government service. Seriously, there is not as much of the law that is an open-and-shut case as you and other conservatives enamored of the “umpire” metaphor seem to believe.
Take Raich: did Scalia engage in judicial activism there, or did Thomas? Or United States v. Harris, another close case where Scalia and Thomas were on opposite sides — who’s the judicial activist, Thomas for saying that the Constitution protects a right to an individually-tailored sentence, or Scalia for upholding the legislative determinations embedded in the federal sentencing guidelines? Or take a more recent decision (from earlier this month): which umpire, Alito or Roberts, musta been blind to end up with different calls on whether a litigant who was not a party to the arbitration agreement may invoke §3 of the FAA to stay litigation?
Being a Supreme Court justice is not as simple as it looks from the National Review’s Corner. The law is not something you can just see with your eyes and you know what it is.
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Considering that we have a majority-conservative Supreme Court, I can’t say I’m shocked that Sotomayor has been reversed by them quite a bit, particularly since the replacement of O’Connor and even Rehnquist by justices who are further to the right. Let me know if you come across a list of her decisions (whether written by her or ones she joined) that have been reversed by something other than a 5-4 majority of the Court (i.e. Sotomayor decisions that have been deemed wrong by Souter — the guy she’s replacing — Stevens, Breyer or Ginsburg).
Jake,
Thanks for the 538 link. I especially prized the post linked in the one you noted, where Nate takes apart Greg Mankiw for complaining that Sotomayor hasn’t saved enough money. I look forward to Mankiw’s reaming out Justice Roberts and other conservative judges who have actually complained that federal judicial salaries are insufficient. (Sotomayor, so far as I know, doesn’t go around bemoaning the fact that it’s Congress’s fault that she doesn’t have a quarter mil in the bank.)
Mankiw’s complaint wasn’t a hit and run. He does this all the time. Its an econ blog. he likes to analyze public servant’s investment and saving habits. I recall the Palins scored off the charts (good). Wasn’t really a swipe at Soto as a Justice, just a mild rebuke for being fiscally irresponsible with her own money.
Manju,
Couldy you link Mankiw’s post complaining about Roberts’s demands for higher judicial salaries, then? Presumably Roberts wouldn’t be worrying about this if those salaries were allowing judges to save for retirement, send their kids to college, etc., so it’s a sign that judges as a whole must be too extravagant.
Also, could you refute Silver’s point that given Sotomayor’s situation (a life tenured job at a salary that cannot be reduced; no husband nor children; health care through the government; generous pension), it’s ridiculous for Mankiw to expect her to save lots of money that she doesn’t actually need for any particular purpose? Her situation is extremely different from that of the Palins, whose jobs are not as dependable (Gov. Palin could be voted out of office; Mr. Palin could be injured or otherwise lose his job in the oil fields); who have several young children to feed and educate, including one who may end up needing lifelong care; who now have a grandchild to help support as well.
Is Mankiw upset that Sotomayor isn’t bulking up an estate for her heirs (whoever they might be)? Does he think, contra most economists, that it’s worse for the U.S. economy for someone to spend their money locally today instead of putting it into savings?
It sounds like Mankiw believes that people ought to save money because the act of saving is just inherently virtuous, while not saving money is inherently wicked. I am trying to think of a mindset that is less in keeping with homo economicus than one that judges behavior by abstract virtues and vices that have no relationship to the individual’s actual incentives, as Nate identified.
well that’s not what he does. he doesn’t scold people for demanding higher salaries. He analyzes how people save money (investment vehicles, etc) based on disclosures public servants are forced to make. its a little side thing he’s had on his blog for a while.
GM:
So basically he’s using his authority as an economist to promote a belief that he’s attributing not to himself but to his deceased grandmother, who can’t defend herself? Class.
PG,
I think that “empathy” is the wrong word. I’m all for outside-the-box thinking, and used to teach it where I worked to great effect. Good stuff. But outside-the-box thinking is different from “empathy”.
“Empathy” is about feelings and emotions — not just comprehending how laws and facts intersect, but getting the feelings that a specific individual (or group) might have in a case. “Empathy”, while not the opposite of “dispassionate” is excluded — one cannot have “empathy” and be “dispassionate” (okay, one can, but they’d have to ignore it).
I think this comes down to why people of color attacked both Clarence Thomas, and to some degree even Barack Obama, as not being “black enough”. Not because their skin is some lighter shade of brown, or in Obama’s case because his mother was white, but because his experience-of-blackness was not within the norm of some “Black Experience”.
In the case of Judge Sotomajor, she has a more normative “Latina Experience” and I think the good white folk of the GOP know that her experiences are going to inform her decisions a bit more than they’d like.
FCH,
You’re right that empathy includes considering the feelings of the person in the situation, but I don’t think I was referring to “outside-the-box” thinking when I gave Justice Steven’s opinion in Raich as an example of empathy. There’s nothing particularly “outside-the-box” about noticing the actual litigants in the case and that they’re using marijuana not because they’re goofy potheads but because they’re cancer patients trying to stay alive.
I think the reasons for attacking Thomas and Obama were very different. Thomas was attacked not for a lack of “black experience” — he was descended from slaves, grew up in a predominately African American community, co-founded the Black Student Union at his college and participated in a walkout from the school over unequal treatment of black and white students (the priests had to talk the students into returning) — but rather for coming to different conclusions based on that experience than most African Americans do. In particular, his benefiting from Yale Law’s affirmative action program, and then denouncing it and trying to end affirmative action, is seen as “pulling up the ladder” behind himself.
Obama was almost the opposite: not slave-descended, raised by a white mother and grandparents in Hawaii, not particularly active in black politics in college — I think the most he did was deliver a speech against apartheid. It was this lack of living among and working with other black people that made him distrusted by some.
PG writes:
Then perhaps I chose the wrong term. But whatever it is we’re talking about, I don’t want “empathy” on the bench. If all of the facts of a case expose a problem with the law, that’s one thing.
The facts in Raich, as Justice Thomas noted in his (lengthy) dissent, do not support claiming that medical marijuana production is “Commerce”. Failing to LOGICALLY think the through entire chain of events — which is “outside-the-box thinking” would have led the justices to understand that prohibiting the growth of medical marijuana instead promotes interstate (and intrastate) trafficking in marijuana since people with severe health issues likely care less about jail sentences than living. Indeed, when my mother was dying from ovarian cancer 8 years ago, my brothers and I strongly encouraged her to smoke pot in order to better handle the chemotherapy. Why, exactly, she refused is a mystery, but had I known of a supplier, and had she accepted the advice, I’d have connected the two of them together.
That is the sort of thinking I want from a justice. Not, “Oh, the poor dears, let’s decide in their favor” or “Oh, the poor dears, we can’t decide in their favor”, but looking at all of the facts, and the law, and deciding. In the case of Raich it was Thomas who looked at all of the facts, including Madison’s statements about the limits of Federal power. If anything, I’d hope Judge Sotomayor is more like Justice Thomas and less like Justice Stevens.
FCH,
Stevens was upholding, and Thomas was trying to overturn, the Wickard precedent on interstate commerce, under which we have things like the Violence Against Women Act, the federal government’s ability to ban guns in school zones (contra Utah and other states that are forcing schools to permit guns on campus), the federal government’s ability to ban child trafficking (to take one of Sotomayor’s own interstate commerce cases, U.S. v. Giordano), etc.
If you are certain that Thomas is correct about the interstate commerce clause, that’s a tenable position on the Constitution. I just want to be sure you know all the babies you’re throwing out with that bathwater.
PG,
Yes, I’m aware of all the “babies” that would be thrown out. However, unlike the Violence Against Women Act and whatever act it is they use to prohibit guns in school zones, the logical outcome of restricting medical marijuana is MORE illegal marijuana trade.
Mind you, I’m not fond of how the Commerce Clause is twisted, and I’d have preferred Congress find ways to enact laws that don’t require it being twisted further, but the testimony in Raich should have made it clear that ruling FOR medical marijuana would have limited one reason marijuana is trafficked. I think VAWA is an abuse of the Commerce Clause, but at least it is consistent. The decision in Raich isn’t.
Madison’s statement on the limits of federal power is an argument about law, not an argument about facts. The legal argument is about the federal government’s powers under the interstate commerce clause, and that’s where going with Thomas’s argument kills a ton of legislation like VAWA and the Gun-Free School Zones Act. You can make a factual argument about why the statute won’t achieve its intended goals, but that’s nothing like making an originalist argument about the Framers’ intent, which is what quoting Madison does. If Thomas’s legal argument wins in Raich, then you can’t try to save that other legislation by saying that they do achieve their intended goals.
the logical outcome of restricting medical marijuana is MORE illegal marijuana trade.
Well, yes, but isn’t that a bit tautological? Sort of like, “If you outlaw guns, then only outlaws will have guns?” If you have the overall category “marijuana transfers” and you want to make the subcategory “medical marijuana transfers” legal, but the government insists that it should all be illegal, then yes of course there will be more illegal marijuana trade because the government’s said it’s all illegal. It’s not that the government only cares about the “illegal” marijuana trade, because it’s the government that decides what’s legal or illegal in the first place. The government wants to stop the marijuana trade, full stop. The logical outcome of restricting the Brazilian bikini wax trade is that there will be such a thing as illegal Brazilian bikini waxes — not more Brazilian bikini waxes in total.
My aunt died of cancer last year (it would have been her birthday next week) after being in and out of the hospital with it for half her life. In this last bout, one of her other relatives, who is a doctor, told me that medical marijuana probably wasn’t useful because cancer patients can get Marinol, the active ingredient of which is synthetic THC. I understand that some patients don’t respond to Marinol, and it is more expensive than something you can grow in your yard, but I don’t know for how many people the choice really is between “breaking the law by using pot” versus dying.
Moreover, lots of people won’t do things if those things are illegal, particularly if the benefits of breaking the law (maybe medical marijuana will work for them where Marinol hadn’t; maybe it won’t) are uncertain, and the costs of breaking the law are pretty certain. It’s sort of like the torture debate: if we make it illegal, a few people will still do it if they think the benefits override the cost of possibly going to prison, but the vast majority of torture will stop because it never was saving any lives or otherwise as vital as Bush pretended; certainly not beneficial enough that any of the torturers would risk their own liberty over it. Making something illegal never stops *everyone* from doing it, but it does change the cost-benefit analysis enough to stop some people.
Besides, the result in Raich was to allow the federal government to prosecute medical marijuana suppliers, so we can see empirically if you and Thomas are correct. Has the interstate or intrastate trafficking in marijuana increased since Raich? If not, your whole argument falls apart.
From what I read GM’s point is that having sufficient personal savings is a virtue. Wanting higher judicial salaries doesn’t seem to have any bearing on that point.
It seems clear to me that grandmother = common sense + pessimistic economic outlook in the way he used it. But I think you probably knew that already.
told me that medical marijuana probably wasn’t useful because cancer patients can get Marinol, the active ingredient of which is synthetic THC.
No. Chemical issues aside, I understand cancer patients often take marijuana to prevent vomiting. Marinol is a *pill*.
As for Sotomayor, the evidence seems to show her doing what RonF wants (assuming I understand him correctly). Whereas our white male Justices often do not appear interested in thinking beyond their backgrounds. Hopefully Sotomayor can change some of their minds; otherwise I’d prefer a more liberal Justice.
Joe,
From what I read GM’s point is that having sufficient personal savings is a virtue. Wanting higher judicial salaries doesn’t seem to have any bearing on that point.
If you can have “sufficient personal savings” on existing judicial salaries, why would you argue that existing judicial salaries are insufficient to judges’ needs? According to Chief Justice Roberts, a salary of $165,000 threatens to undermine the judiciary’s independence. (And of course federal judges are welcome to do additional work like lecturing at elite law schools, which pays pretty well too.) But if the virtuous judges (and do we really want to retain the non-virtuous ones?) can get by just fine on $165k a year, there’s no need to raise salaries. How do you resolve that?
Also, what does “sufficient personal savings” mean (and does it include assets like Sotomayor’s Greenwich Village apartment, bought for $360k and now worth $1.4mil)? How much should a person have in the bank to be considered virtuous by Mankiw’s standards? Is it measured by the amount of her salary? Or is it, as most people who have had so much as an Econ 101 class might think, measured by what the projected need for savings is, such that a single, childless person with a life tenure job at a guaranteed salary needs less in savings than a person who can be fired without cause at any time and who has a dependent spouse and children to support?
It’s this last point that Mankiw’s readers and other bloggers were making, and Mankiw essentially acknowledges that this is the rational economist view. In order to salvage his original argument, he concludes, “In my savers-spenders model, both savers and spenders may be acting optimally given their own preferences. I am sure, however, that none of these arguments would have convinced my grandmother.”
Why does common sense + pessimistic economic outlook mean that $1.4mil asset and unknown amount in Thrift Savings Plan are insufficient personal savings for a person with no obligations to anyone except herself?
The Puritan ethic believed saving to be a virtue in itself, but the Puritan ethic had precious little to do with sound economic theory in terms of determining what any individual person ought to do.
hf,
Yes, Marinol comes in capsules. Cancer patients quite often are taking their marijuana orally (not to mention their chemotherapy) if they don’t want to smoke. Why does pill = no good to prevent vomiting?
You can vomit something you swallow. It’s much harder to vomit something you smoke.
FCH,
“You can vomit something you swallow. It’s much harder to vomit something you smoke.”
Sure, although some people — I am one of them — will become nauseated by smoking itself. Can you provide an example of someone who cannot use Marinol solely for the reason that she keeps vomiting it up? Angel Raich certainly won’t work as an example, as one way she consumed marijuana was through food. (See Stevens’s opinion: “Raich herself processes some of the marijuana into oils, balms, and foods for consumption.”)
PG,
Considering that nausea and vomiting is a common side-effect of chemotherapy, I think “pot makes me barf” is the exception.
http://www.medmjscience.org/Pages/history/consumerreports.html
FCH,
There’s no logical relationship between “nausea and vomiting is a common side-effect of chemotherapy” and “‘[smoking] pot makes me barf’ is the exception.” Indeed, the article you link doesn’t claim that people end up just barfing their Marinol back up; instead, it says,
And as the article acknowledges, there are newer drugs that are more effective and with fewer side effects than Marinol.
Incidentally, Los Angeles is having a boom in “medical” marijuana dispensaries. I would like for medical marijuana to be available, and for even non-medical marijuana to be decriminalized, but I think that the justices who said that medical marijuana’s availability would affect commerce in marijuana have been shown to be empirically correct. (Not that I had much doubt about it; long before the Raich decision, when I was visiting San Francisco in 2000, I saw ads in the back pages of alternatives weeklies with nudge-nudge-wink-wink offers of “medical” marijuana. Heck, the transfer of marijuana from medical to commercial purposes is a plot element in the TV show “Glee,” which isn’t even set in California.
I have seen the following report in a news outlet whose veracity I have no way to verify. Can anyone tell me if this is true?
President Obama is quoted as claiming that this is taken out of context. Again, I’m not saying “This is what Judge Sotomayor said”. I’m asking.
For goodness sake, Ron, please reassure us that you meant that post as a joke.
That is the funniest thing you’ve ever posted here, RonF. It’s funny, in large part, because freepers believe it’s plausible.
The comments from freeperdom give us a good idea of who we’re dealing with…
Those folks are so far from reality that it’s depressing and scary. And that doesn’t even take into account the (more) obviously racist and misogynist comments which I refuse to quote.
The attacks against Sotomayor are so out of hand that the total nut job who sends me daily e-mails from Nutjobbia (this is in my professional capacity as a reporter) sent me an e-mail defending Sotomayor and decrying the attacks against her as racist.
Oh, even Newt Gingrich has just barely backed away from saying that Sotomayor is a racist. Aside from Limbaugh, out there keepin’ it real, the GOP’s elected leadership and more prominent speakers seem to have figured out that calling someone a racist for a single sentence in a speech, especially from the party that feted William F. Buckley (who justified Southerners’ resistance to desegregation on the grounds of the white race’s superiority), is not going to go well.
The more intelligent among the Republicans have stuck to saying how “troubled” they are by her words, and how they can’t vote for her because of ideological disagreement, but also how they need to delay voting against her for several months while they learn more about her. (Which will cause them to change their minds? I really want Lindsay Graham to explain what he think he’ll discover by September that will wipe out his current concerns enough that he can vote for Sotomayor. You wanna vote against her, OK, vote against — Senate confirmation, as we saw with Clarence Thomas, doesn’t require a 2/3 majority, and Dems have that majority anyway. Seriously, Cornyn, McCain, all of y’all who want to be re-elected in states with significant Latino voting populations: go ahead and vote against her today. She’ll still be on the Court.)
This guy actually gave a fairly vigorous defense, praising the contributions of Latino culture to America as a whole, accusing the Republicans of just trying to stir up racism to raise money, and saying the president is entitled to his pick. This from a guy who sends me “Obama’s a secret Muslim who will sell us out to the Arabs” e-mails!
On the contrary! If they posted that in all seriousness, Ron, you now have an excellent method for evaluating their veracity.
—Myca
PG Wrote
I could argue (no idea personally) that the judge could demand a higher salary and standard of living doing other work and that to retain the best judges the salary needs to be higher.
kids crying, to be continued.
Joe,
Most federal judges certainly could earn more money in the private sector — heck, my friend who clerked for a federal district court judge made more money as a first year associate, with salary plus bonus, than his judge does each year. But it’s generally understood that one doesn’t go into government for the money; we don’t raise the salary of the president, even though most people who achieve the office could make more money elsewhere, because of the benefits of the work that aren’t a matter of annual salary.
These may still be monetizable benefits, such as pension and health care, or part of the work-leisure trade-off inasmuch as government employees generally get more vacation and better work hours than their peers in the private sector, but at a certain level, such as federal judge or ambassador, there’s also a big power & prestige factor. You don’t get to put any special title in front of your name if you’re a partner at Hogan & Hartson, even if you make 10 times what a federal judge does.
One reason it is sensible for judges to be a bit older is that by 50 or so, they’ve probably raised their kids, maybe even gotten them through college, and have fewer demands on their resources, and hopefully have saved some money from being, say, a partner at a big law firm. But the existence of judges who haven’t done that yet is a substantial part of the argument for higher judicial salaries. No sane person says that a judicial salary should be competitive with the private sector, given that even first year associates at the top law firms now start at $160k+, but rather that the judicial salary must be sufficient to meet the reasonable needs of the people who go into this work. Sending your kids through a private school and college, being a homeowner, being able to go nice places during your generous government-employee vacation time… the expected accoutrements of upper middle class/ upper class life.
Ah, geez. Sometimes I should just back away from the keyboard.
I plead mental fatigue. A couple of days ago the day ended with me carrying Jordan, our dog of 14.5 years and the sweetest-dispositioned Golden Retriever you’d ever want to see, into the vet to be put to sleep. I originally took her in a week ago because she fell down and could no longer walk. After arthritis medicine had only a couple of days’ effect we had her X-rayed. It showed that a mammary tumor had spread to her liver and there was no hope.
The kids were small when we got her. I still remember the car ride when my wife and I took the kids to go pick her up and bring her home. She was the last living connection to when the kids were growing up. It’s a lot quieter now when I come home from work. Too damn quiet, in fact.
My son came home from college and we discussed it with him – she was his dog too. His comment was essentially “What are you waiting for? It’s time.” She’d been whimpering because she couldn’t get up the stairs to sleep next to us, so I came downstairs and slept on the sofa for her last night so that she’d be next to one of us. In the morning I cleaned her off (she couldn’t move to go outside). My son and I put her on a tarpaulin and carried her to the van, but when we got to the vet I told him I’d be damned if she’d be carried into the vet on a tarp like a load of trash. So I picked her up – 65 pounds and wet with urine again – and carried her in like a baby.
I give even money the bank calls about the check I wrote the vet. I could barely see the checkbook and my hand was shaking.
Removed by me because Ron’s edits make my comment rather a non sequitur.
I’m sorry about your dog. That’s a hard way to go out.
RonF, sorry about your dog. I know this is too soon, but if she was your only pet and your kids are all out of the house, I’d strongly recommend getting a new one when you’re ready. It made a big difference for my parents to have a pet in the house after all of us had moved out.
Back to the topic of this thread: today’s frustrating misreading of the speech comes from Slate, where John Dickerson repeatedly claims that Sotomayor was saying that she’s “better” than white men.
To balance that out, an excellent piece on how minorities are expected to talk about race (and thus often end up saying something that’s fodder for the opposition), while the majority is allowed to remain silent on the subject.
Do you have an example? I’d love to see it.
The Onion’s “long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over” is more believable than the CarbolicSmokeBall piece and that Onion satire of Bush isn’t believable at all. The Onion article wasn’t funny because it was plausible that Bush would say such a thing but because we knew that Bush was opposed to Clinton era policies that were widely viewed as successful combined with all of Bush’s campaign talk about how lousy the economy was.
Likewise, the piece from CarbolicSmokeBall isn’t funny because it is plausible that Sotomayor would ever say such a thing but because that is the (seemingly, after reading the comments there, very slightly) exaggerated right wing interpretation of Sotomayor (and non-reactionary women in general). And the fun poked at politicians by the, “Obama says it was taken out of context,” part.
Only now I don’t find the CarbolicSmokeBall piece so funny. If somebody as reality based as RonF (and he does, for the most part, have a good handle on reality) wondered if it could be true….. Well, it just doesn’t bode well for the present or the future.
I’m very sorry about your dog, RonF. My condolences.
Ron, I’m so sorry to hear about your dog. We recently had to put our cat of 13 years to sleep; it’s a hard thing to have to do. My heart’s with you and your family.
Jake,
I don’t have an example that I can link to. It’s a “I’m pretty sure I remember that happening once or twice” kind of thing. I’m not just saying it to give some sort of false equivalence, but no, no link.
As I think I said (I don’t have a copy of what I wrote then removed that you’re quoting from), I’ve probably seen more cases where I thought it must be a joke and it wasn’t.
I am ashamed of myself. I don’t get caught like that too often.
I want another dog. My wife is reluctant. So far it’s “Now we can take down the fence.” “No, we’ll need it when we get another dog.” It seems a bit callous to be talking about another dog now but I suppose that’s reality. I really felt like I was betraying her – after all, she trusted me and here I went and took her to be killed. But letting it go where she was unable to walk and the tumors would be taking her body over completely was not something to wait on. Fortunately when the kids were both in a couple of weeks ago I made sure to have pictures taken with them and the dog.
I’m thinking a dog from a local rescue shelter that’s about 50 pounds and shorter-haired. Probably a mutt, maybe a German/Lab cross, but that would probably run over 50 pounds. There’s some no-kill shelters around and I’ve got the room to let a larger dog run around. The fence encloses about 1/3 of an acre, and we had a doggy door in the patio door so that he or she can go in and out as they please (although it let some cold air in this winter when it got down to -5 F (that’s -20 C for you international types)).
No. You did not betray her. You gave her the final gift that you were able to – you stopped the suffering and you were there with her until the end. Her trust was in no way betrayed. I can only hope somebody will be kind enough to do that for me should I ever come to that point.
It’s always sad when a beloved pet reaches the end and it is almost inevitable that we feel guilty, that we feel we could have done more/something differently. You did your best and that’s all that can be asked of you.
I’ve had to go through that far too many times in the last couple of years with aging, suffering pets. The only thing that consoles me is that I was with them, holding them as they drifted off and that I was fortunate enough to find vets willing to come to my home to help me and my pet.
You had a wonderful time with your dog and gave her the best you were capable of. You’re not being callous. There are lots of dogs that need what you can give and you’ll wind up giving a good life to a deserving dog while enjoying it. I wish you the best of luck in finding the next perfect dog for you.
Outrages du jour re: Sotomayor:
1) She gave a speech in April to the NYU Black, Latino, Asian Pacific American Law Alumni Association, titled “Being the Change We Need for Our Communities,” with these damning statements:
“The power of working together was, this past November, resoundingly proven.”
“The wide coalition of groups that joined forces to elect America’s first Afro-American President was awe inspiring in both the passion the members of the coalition exhibited in their efforts and the discipline they showed in the execution of their goals.”
“I hope that it does not take a grand historical event like the Presidential election of a person of color to remind us that the differences we project onto others and which so often alienate us from each other are superficial and not terribly meaningful.”
“On November 4, we saw past our ethnic, religious and gender differences.”
“What is our challenge today: Our challenge as lawyers and court related professionals and staff, as citizens of the world is to keep the spirit of the common joy we shared on November 4 alive in our everyday existence. We have to continue to work together for our common goal of bringing the promise of America’s greatness and fairness to all members of our society.”
“It is the message of service that President Obama is trying to trumpet and it is a clarion call we are obligated to heed.”
The fact that several lauded conservative judges, including Brett Kavanaugh and Michael McConnell, gave thousands of dollars directly to the presidential campaign of the president who would nominate them (as well as to the Senatorial campaigns of Republican senators who would end up voting on their confirmation), however, is totally not a problem.
2) In college, she wrote a thesis paper in support of Puerto Rico’s becoming independent of the U.S. Then in law school, she wrote an article about PR’s becoming a state on terms favorable for its mineral rights. In the 30 years since that second paper, who knows how much more conservative she may have become about PR’s status relative to the U.S.?
ETA: For other people obsessing on this, all the information given to the Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to be posted here.
I’m sorry, Ron.
We had to put down our pet rat about a month ago. She was a rat, granted. But a very charismatic and friendly one, and I felt very responsible for her, and she died sort of horribly over the course of a couple weeks. I was surprised by how much I cried. (A rat. A rat, I kept reminding myself, to very little avail.) We’ve acquired a cat now. She purrs and follows me around and is very distressed by things like the shower curtain, which mean she cannot see me.
I feel for you and your wife.