Livin' La Vida Sonia

Campus Report ^ | June 16, 2009 | Brittany Fortier

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Livin’ La Vida Sonia

by: Brittany Fortier, June 16, 2009

While Senate leaders discussed when the confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor would take place, a panel hosted by the American Constitutional Society on June 10, 2009 debated the issues surrounding the controversial nominee.* Moderator Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor and correspondent for Slate magazine, began by asking the panelists to define and discuss terms such as “judicial activism” and “empathy.” Cristina Rodriguez, Professor of law at New York University School of Law, argued that “judicial activism” refers to instances “when a court strikes down an action by the political branches of government.”

Rodriguez acknowledged that “it is perfectly appropriate for judges to strike down the actions of the political branches of government in some circumstances,” but said that the debate is “when it is appropriate for judges to be activists.”

M. Edward Whelan, III, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argued that “the effort to make [the term judicial activist] neutral … is depriving it of the stigma that it’s properly earned over the decades.” Instead, Whelan defined the term “judicial activism” as “the wrongful overriding of democratic enactments, generally through the invention of supposed constitutional rights.” With regards to “empathy,” Whelan argued that “to the extent that the term … is loaded, it is President Obama who has done the loading.” Whelan also expressed concerns about Sotomayor’s ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano, a case involving the employment tests of white firefighters from New Haven, Connecticut. “[Sotomayor and her colleagues] were discounting the value of the work of firefighters[.] … [R]acial quotas were being elevated over public safety.”...