Saturday, May 30, 2009

Barack Obama sought to quell Sotomayor dust-up

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President Obama sought yesterday to douse the political firestorm over Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's much-dissected 2001 remark that a "wise Latina woman" could often reach "better" judgments than a white judge. […] "She was simply saying that her life experiences will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people are going through [and] that will make her a good judge," the president said in an interview with NBC News.

"Part of the job of a justice on the Supreme Court, or any judge, is to be able to stand in somebody else's shoes, to be able to, you know, understand the nature of the case, and how it has an impact on people's ordinary day-to-day lives," he added.

The remark at issue was made during a speech at the University of California at Berkeley in which Sotomayor said "our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging." "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," she said… The Boston Globe
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