Videotaped remarks shed light on Sotomayor
Charlie Savage, New York Times
Washington — Judge Sonia Sotomayor once described herself as “a product of affirmative action” who was admitted to two Ivy League schools despite scoring lower on standardized tests than many classmates, which she attributed to “cultural biases” that are “built into testing.” On another occasion, she aligned with conservatives who take a limited view of when international law can be enforced in U.S. courts.
But she criticized conservative objections to recent Supreme Court rulings that mention foreign law as being based on a “misunderstanding.” Those comments were among a trove of videos dating back nearly 25 years that shed new light on Sotomayor’s views. She provided the videos to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week as it prepares for her Supreme Court confirmation hearing next month.
The clips include lengthy remarks about her experiences as an “affirmative action baby” whose lower test scores were overlooked by admissions committees at Princeton University and Yale Law School because, she said, she is Latino and had grown up in poor circumstances. “If we had gone through the traditional numbers route of those institutions, it would have been highly questionable if I would have been accepted,” she said on a panel of three female judges from New York who were discussing women in the judiciary. The video is dated “early 1990s” in Senate records.
Her comments came in the context of explaining why she thought it was “critical that we promote diversity” by appointing more women and minority judges, and they provoked objections among other panelists who pointed out that she graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and had been an editor on Yale’s law journal.
But Sotomayor insisted that her test scores were subpar – “though not so far off the mark that I wasn’t able to succeed at those institutions.” Her scores have not been made public. “With my academic achievement in high school I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates,” she said. “And that’s been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that – there are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects.”
Sotomayor’s approach to affirmative action has been the subject of intense scrutiny. Conservatives have criticized her remarks in speeches that her personal experiences will influence her judging. If she is confirmed, Sotomayor would fill the seat being vacated by Justice David Souter, who has voted to uphold affirmative-action programs.
But in April, Sotomayor delivered a speech on how federal judges look at foreign and international law that suggested she may take a more conservative position on that topic than Souter. She said individuals have no right to file a lawsuit to enforce a treaty and ratified treaties are not legally binding unless Congress separately passes a statute to do so. Treaties usually have effect, she said, only if the president and Congress choose to respect such obligations as a matter of politics, not law. “Even though Article IV of the Constitution says that treaties are the ‘supreme law of the land,’ in most instances they’re not even law,” she said.
That principle, she said, explained the outcome of a high-profile 2008 Supreme Court ruling, Medellin vs. Texas, which involved a ruling by the International Court of Justice that some Mexican inmates on death row in Texas should get new sentencing hearings because authorities failed to help them get assistance from the Mexican consulate, contrary to a treaty the United States had ratified.
But the Supreme Court ruled that the international court’s decision had no legal force and that the treaty was not binding, because Congress never passed a statute explicitly making it domestic law. The ruling, Sotomayor said, “surprised many human rights groups and civil liberties groups” but was “premised on very traditional American law principles.”
Her remarks aligned her with the Supreme Court’s majority; among the three dissenting votes in that case was Souter.
Copyright 2009 SF Chronicle