re: #517 quickjustice

Z— I’ve argued cases to various U.S. Courts of Appeals, including the Third Circuit (N.J., Del., and PA). The U.S. Supreme Court only accepts 1% or less of appeals from decisions of those courts. As a practical matter, that means that the decisions of the Courts of Appeals often are final. It also means that cases in which Sotomayor has been reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court are a tiny fraction of all of her decisions.

Most reported cases decided by a U.S. Court of Appeals make policy for a region. By “policy”, I mean construction of some important statute, or of the U.S. Constitution. Sometimes courts of appeals disagree among themselves on important policy matters. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court often intervenes. I saw the video clip of Sotomayor referring to “policy”. The only way that remark could embarrass her is if the “policy” decided by the court is inconsistent with the statute or the U.S. Constitution.

re: #520 medaura18586

I’m not a Republican hack, and was not old enough to pay attention to the nomination process regarding these judges. The eventual nominee will be either male or female, and I don’t necessarily read much into the gender, but in this case, all of the candidates in Obama’s short-list were women. Am I do view that as an innocent statistical improbability, or do we have some strict affirmative action in place at the pre-selection phase? No men were even considered for the job. I find that disturbing.

By the way, I’m not a fan either of Bush (senior or junior) nor of Reagan, and if the race and gender of the justices they nominated played an important role in the selection, that too disgusts me. For the same reasons.

I’m a little rusty on my SC history, but I do know that for much of the 20th century, there were actually SC seats known to “belong” to various groups, i.e., a Catholic seat, a Jewish seat, etc… With LBJ’s pick of Marshall, a Black seat was created, and with Reagan’s pick of O’connor, a female seat was created. Obviously this is not official policy, and at some point, a seat may lose its status as “being” catholic for example, if Catholics are appointed to other SC seats. Anyway, regardless of one’s personal views of this practice, I think Dem and Republican presidents have both been loathe to ignore this unofficial policy.