Sotomayor, Baseball’s Savior, May Be Possibility for High Court (original) (raw)
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On a Supreme Court Prospect’s Résumé: ‘Baseball Savior’
- May 14, 2009
WASHINGTON Federal judges are rarely famous or widely celebrated. Yet during a brief period in 1995, Judge Sonia Sotomayor became revered, at least in those cities with major league baseball teams.
She ended a long baseball strike that year, briskly ruling against the owners in favor of the players.
The owners were trying to subvert the labor system, she said, and the strike had “placed the entire concept of collective bargaining on trial.”
After play resumed, The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that by saving the season, Judge Sotomayor joined forever the ranks of Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson and Ted Williams. The Chicago Sun-Times said she “delivered a wicked fastball” to baseball owners and emerged as one of the most inspiring figures in the history of the sport.
Judge Sotomayor is now high on lists that lawyers and politicians have assembled of possible replacements for Justice David H. Souter of the Supreme Court.
Part of the reason is her approach on the bench, which she displayed as a trial judge in the baseball strike and for the last 11 years has shown as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York City. She questions lawyers vigorously, and delivers what her admirers say are crisp, forceful and reasoned decisions.
But her potential appeal to President Obama as a nominee to the Supreme Court also derives in part from her personal story, a version of the up-from-modest-circumstances tales that have long been used to build political support. Judge Sotomayor, 54, grew up in a Bronx housing project, a child of Puerto Rican parents. She would be the court’s first Hispanic justice.
Her father died when she was 9, leaving her mother to raise her and a brother. In speeches to Latino groups over the years, Judge Sotomayor has recalled how her mother worked six days a week as a nurse to send her and her brother to Catholic school, purchased the only set of encyclopedias in the neighborhood and kept a warm pot of rice and beans on the stove every day for their friends.
She loved Nancy Drew mysteries, she once said, and yearned to be a police detective. But a doctor who diagnosed her childhood diabetes suggested that would be difficult. She traded her adoration of Nancy for an allegiance to Perry she became a fan of Perry Mason on television, she said, and decided to become a lawyer.
She went to Princeton, which she has described as a life-changing experience. When she arrived on campus from the Bronx, she said it was like “a visitor landing in an alien country.” She never raised her hand in her first year there. “I was too embarrassed and too intimidated to ask questions,” Judge Sotomayor said.
In one speech, she sounded some themes similar to Mr. Obama’s description of his social uncertainties as a biracial youth in a largely white society.
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Judge Sonia Sotomayor ended a baseball strike in 1995.Credit...Ron Jordan Natoli Studio/U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
“I have spent my years since Princeton, while at law school and in my various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of the worlds I inhabit,” she said, adding that that despite her accomplishments, “I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up.”
After graduating summa cum laude from Princeton, she went to Yale Law School, worked for Robert M. Morgenthau in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and spent time in private practice before being named to the bench.
In addition to ending the baseball strike while on the trial court, Judge Sotomayor ruled in another case that homeless people working for the Grand Central Partnership, a business consortium, had to be paid the minimum wage.
She had been nominated to the district court in 1992 by the first President Bush, but actually chosen for the seat by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, who had an arrangement with his Republican counterpart, Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, to share district court judge selections in New York.
In 1997, Republican senators held up her nomination by President Bill Clinton to the appeals court for more than a year, because they believed that as a Hispanic appellate judge she would be a formidable candidate for the Supreme Court.
On the Circuit Court, she has been involved in few controversial issues like abortion. Some of her most notable decisions came in child custody and complex business cases.
Her most high-profile case involved New Haven’s decision to toss out tests used to evaluate candidates for promotion in the fire department because there were no minority candidates at the top of the list.
She was part of a panel that rejected the challenge brought by white firefighters who scored high but were denied promotion. Frank Ricci, the lead plaintiff, argued that it was unfair he was denied promotion after he had studied intensively for the exam and even paid for special coaching to overcome his dyslexia.
The case produced a heated split in the Circuit Court and is now before the Supreme Court.
Judge Sotomayor married before she graduated from college and divorced a few years later. Her diabetes, for which she takes insulin daily, has not proved to be a problem, but some have speculated as to whether her illness could or should be an issue in terms of her projected longevity on the court, because of the potential for complications.
Some lawyers have described her courtroom manner as abrupt, but several others said in interviews that it represents nothing more than her direct, New York style. Judge Martin Glenn, who as a veteran appeals lawyer had appeared before her frequently, said that she was widely regarded as an excellent judge.
Judge Glenn, now a federal bankruptcy judge, said that Judge Sotomayor always asked “questions that were penetrating but fair.”
“She was always respectful,” he said.
Judge Glenn said lawyers generally regard her as representative of what he said is called “a hot bench,” meaning that questions come fast and furious and lawyers have to be fully prepared.
A correction was made on
May 16, 2009
:
An article on Friday about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a possible candidate for nomination to the Supreme Court, referred incorrectly to her parents. As people who moved to New York from Puerto Rico, they were United States citizens. They were not “immigrants.”
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