SOTOMAYOR'S BEST TRAITS ARE HER CRITICS' TALKING POINTS

uExpress, May, 2009 by Cynthia Tucker

"Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see." -- Sonia Sotomayor, Oct. 2001

Eight years ago, Judge Sonia Sotomayor gave an unremarkable speech at the University of California, Berkeley, in which she discussed the importance of race and gender diversity on the bench. Given the bitter partisan battles that accompany Supreme Court nominations, it is altogether unsurprising that hysterical conservative commentators have used out-of-context quotes from that speech to cast Sotomayor as a scary "reverse racist."

Neither the rants of Rush Limbaugh nor the Twitter twitches of Newt Gingrich are worth refuting. Nor does Sotomayor -- who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and was an editor of the law journal at Yale -- need any defense against the ugly...

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