Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Goldstein on Judge Sotomayor and Race   [Ed Whelan]

At SCOTUSblog, Tom Goldstein, an early and ardent supporter of Judge Sotomayor’s nomination, has two posts in which he undertakes to “review[] every single race-related case on which she sat on the Second Circuit.”  Goldstein’s review has gotten a lot of attention, but as Jonathan Adler points out, the sort of statistical review that Goldstein provides, even if done accurately and transparently, can go only so far in providing reliable insights. 

Further, I’ll note that (from what I can tell) Goldstein’s review omits the important case of Brown v. City of Oneonta, 235 F.3d 769 (2d Cir. 2000), in which Judge Sotomayor joined an opinion dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc that set forth what Chief Judge Walker called “novel equal protection theories that … would severely impact police protection.” 

It may be that Goldstein has for some odd reason omitted en banc proceedings entirely from his review.  Jonathan notes that Goldstein’s review doesn’t include Sotomayor’s dissent in Hayden v. Pataki, in which the en banc majority rejected a Voting Rights Act challenge to New York’s felon-disenfranchisement law. 

06/02 11:49 AMShare