Legal Experts Say Supreme Court Decision Should Not Affect Sotomayor Hearing

By Learned Foote- Talk Radio News Service

A panel of legal experts argued on Monday that the 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court in Ricci v. DeStefano should not affect the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. The Center for American Progress and the American Constitution Society hosted the panel.

The Supreme Court found that the city of New Haven did not have sufficient grounds to throw out the results of a test designed to specify officers for promotion, even though black and Hispanic firefighters fared relatively poorly on the test. The opinion struck down a ruling issued by the district court and upheld by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, upon which Sotomayor serves. Four justices, including Stevens, Breyer, and Souter, signed a dissent written by Justice Ginsburg.

Tom Goldstein of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, founder of the popular SCOTUSblog, acknowledged that the majority opinion interpreted the law differently than Sonia Sotomayor had. He quoted Justice Kennedy, however, who had said that the law under consideration was unclear. Goldstein also noted that Ginsburg’s dissent said that Sotomayor followed precedent set by the 2nd Circuit.

Goldstein said that the majority opinion indicated an unwillingness to engage with the political process surrounding Sotomayor’s confirmation. He said the opinion “seemed to go out of its way to avoid openly criticizing the second circuit panel on which Judge Sotomayor sat, rather than sort of taking the Court of Appeals openly to task.”

Kevin Russell of Howe & Russell pointed out that Justice Souter—whom Sotomayor could potentially replace on the Supreme Court—signed onto the dissent. He said that the four dissenting justices “thought that Judge Sotomayor’s opinion was correct in concluding that this is not the kind of decision that requires a special justification, it’s not the equivalent of intentional racial discrimination, and that New Haven had substantial leeway to throw the results of these tests out based on the evidence that it had before it.”