Tuesday, July 14, 2009

What Ricci Says About Sotomayor - and Obama

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Many people have been concerned about Judge Sotomayor since hearing her comment that a wise Latina woman would make better judicial decisions than a white male. They've wondered whether her willingness to judge people by the group to which they belong and her stereotypes about that group will affect her judicial decisions once she's on the U.S. Supreme Court and no longer subject to any oversight.

Ricci indicates that it will.

When New Haven firefighters took the lieutenant promotion test, only whites scored high enough to fill the eight current vacancies (for details about these exams, see Justice Kennedy's opinion). The specific legal question in Ricci was: May an employer disregard the results of a promotion exam because too many individuals of one race had the best scores?

All nine Supreme Court justices ruled it was wrong for New Haven to discard the test results merely because there was a racial disparity in test scores.

Did Judge Sotomayor agree with any of the Supreme Court justices?

No. Instead, she decided that an employer can disregard test results whenever a test disproportionately favors members of one race over another, even though the employer has no "strong basis in evidence" or "good cause" to believe any discrimination occurred.

President Obama's selection of Judge Sotomayor should disappoint white supporters who saw his election as absolving them from the sin of racism. His selection of Judge Sotomayor shows that he still considers whites to have unfairly benefited from racism and that it's still okay to discriminate against whites to remedy past sins.

[This is a life time appointment, occuring this week -

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image toon 1st - bbro legal = Sotomayor cuts wholes through blindfold re New Haven

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