Newly sworn in Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is congratulated by Chief Justice John Roberts as her mother, Celina Sotomayor, and her brother, Juan Luis Sotomayor, look on. Photo by Reuters.

Chief Justice John Roberts swore in Sonia Sotomayor today as the 111th Justice of the Supreme Court. Roberts first administered the Constitutional Oath in a private ceremony in the Justices’ Conference Room attended by members of the Sotomayor family. The Chief Justice then administered the Judicial Oath in the East Conference Room before a small gathering of Judge Sotomayor’s family and friends.

A formal investiture ceremony will take place on Tuesday, September 8, at 2 p.m. at a special sitting of the Court in the Courtroom.

Follow MALDEF (http://twitter.com/MALDEF) and Nan Aron (http://twitter.com/NanAron) of Alliance for Justice on Twitter for the latest news.

Read the piece here.

In the later afternoon or evening on Thursday, August 6, Senators are scheduled to vote to confirm the first Hispanic and only 3rd woman to our nation’s highest court. We are confident that because of her exceptional legal career and demonstrated commitment to the law Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed, but some Senators are still on the fence. Call your Senator (202-224-3121) and urge them vote in support of Sotomayor’s nomination.

We need more Republican Senators to follow the lead of Senators like Lindsay Graham (R-SC), Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Mel Martinez (R-FL) who have all announced their support for Judge Sotomayor. Judge Sotomayor deserves a broad bipartisan vote of confidence. By coming together to watch this vote, you’ll not only be watching history in the making, you’ll be sending your Senators the message that you are watching them.

If you can host a watch party, please let us know so we can let people in your area know and make sure your Senator knows you’ll be watching.

“The case being made against her is strikingly weak. Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, said he doubts that she has ‘the deep-rooted convictions necessary to resist the siren call of judicial activism.’

“The term judicial activism is of dubious meaning, at best, and is generally used by conservative Republicans to attack judges whose decisions they do not like. By the most common objective criteria — such as a willingness to strike down Congressional laws as unconstitutional — conservative justices are at least as activist as liberals.

“Some Republicans may be wary of opposing Judge Sotomayor because she would be the first Hispanic justice, and they are reluctant to alienate a large voting bloc. There is no need for political calculations. Senators should support her because she is eminently qualified.”

Read the full editorial.

” … polls and elections also show that Americans collectively really don’t care whether bipartisanship happens, making them the raving hypocrites rather than the politicians who get blamed for partisan rancor when they’re merely reflecting the electorate.

“In fact, numbers would suggest that as much as Americans profess to like amicability, they reward political divisiveness. In the autumn of 2005, half the Democrats in the Senate joined Republicans in a 78-22 confirmation of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr..

“However, in 2006, the year of midterm elections, only four Democrats crossed the aisle to confirm Justice Samuel Alito in a 58-42 vote closer to party lines. Not one single Democrat voted for Alito in committee.

“The result that year: Voters awarded control of both houses of Congress to partisan Democrat leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi for the first time since 1994. And they haven’t really looked across the aisle since.”

Read the full post.

As Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings have progressed, senators and the media have focused heavily on one much-hyped comment. Famously, Sotomayor said that she hopes 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.”

The comment reflects Sotomayor’s apparent belief that a judge’s ethnic background, gender, and life experiences affect—and can even enhance—her decision-making. In the political realm, Sotomayor’s comment has received nary an endorsement, and has in fact elicited harsh criticism from Republicans as a moniker of identity politics. Meanwhile, Democrats in the Senate and President Obama have distanced themselves from the comment, suggesting the judge made a poor choice of words.

Thinking about Sotomayor’s remark from a legal perspective, however, I am not troubled by it. (Nor do I find it to be merely a “rhetorical flourish,” as Judge Sotomayor herself characterized it at the hearings.) Rather, I am intrigued by it – as I will explain.

I teach a law school course on a subject—employment discrimination—in which gender and ethnicity matter, and in which the unique perspectives of women and of Latinas (as well as of African Americans, Asian Americans, etc.) matter. It is a subject in which I encounter and teach federal appeals court decisions by white judges and male judges who are doing their best to adopt the perspective of an employee who is a woman and/or a member of an ethnic minority.

These cases—concerning alleged harassment in the workplace because of sex, race, or national origin—illustrate the relevance and importance of Sotomayor’s remark. They also counsel against superficial rejection of that remark on the grounds that personal experiences categorically can never play a role in judging.

Read the full article.

Read the full article.

“Prior to this decade,” writes Savage, “Supreme Court justices who won confirmation usually had the backing of most of the Senate. Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy all won confirmation by unanimous votes. Sotomayor would replace retired Justice David H. Souter, who was confirmed by a 90-9 vote in 1990. The one notable exception among the veteran members of the high court was Justice Clarence Thomas, who was confirmed by a 52-48 vote in 1991.”

A June piece on RollCall.com by Simon Lazarus, public policy counsel to the National Senior Citizens Law Center, rebuts the Republican attempt to rewrite history.

“This blame-the-victim gambit misreads history,” wrote Lazarus. “Professional fitness was not the only reason Republicans voted for Ginsburg, Breyer and most of Clinton’s first-term lower court nominees. Before names were submitted, Hatch had advised Clinton to ‘move to the center’ on his choices, and Clinton acquiesced. Both Supreme Court nominees presented distinctly moderate profiles. Ginsburg’s voting record on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals was, as Hatch observed, ‘very similar’ to her former D.C. Circuit colleague Antonin Scalia.”

Many Republicans in the Senate appear to favor changing the rules of the game as it suits their political right-wing agena. When they last controlled the Senate, they opposed filibusters saying that only “up or down” votes were fair (knowing that they had enough votes for a simple majority vote. Now that voters have put Republicans into the Senate minority, they initially refused to rule out filibusters in order to send the message that they would attempt it if they needed to. Most prominent GOP Senators later said on the record they would not support a filibuster against Sotomayor, but only after first making the threat.