Her supporters say she was speaking of the virtues of a judge having a diverse set of experiences, not asserting that one ethnic background was superior to another.
Rachel F. Moran, a law professor at UC Irvine, has known Sotomayor since their days as students at Yale Law School. She invited the judge to speak at UC Berkeley in 2001, at a conference on the shortage of Latinos on the bench. It was there that Sotomayor spoke of her hope that a wise Latina would make better decisions as a judge.
"I was caught off guard by all the attention this has received," Moran said recently. "People are affected by their background and experience. Her claim was not that your individual perspective is better or worse, but that you reach better outcomes when multiple perspectives are represented. That's why we have nine people [on the Supreme Court] reviewing decisions."
But Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, has linked that speech to Obama's comment about empathy and Sotomayor's decision last year to reject a discrimination claim from white firefighters in Connecticut. And the lawmaker has questioned whether Sotomayor would be an impartial judge.
"Empathy is great, perhaps, if you're the beneficiary of it," he said in a Senate speech last week. "But it is not good if you are the litigant on the wrong side of the case, if you don't catch the judge's fancy, or if you fail to appeal to a shared personal experience."
Sotomayor has described herself as an "affirmative action baby," and she has spoken in favor of strict limits on campaign spending. Both stands should put her with the court's liberal bloc. However, she twice has ruled in favor of using police evidence that was obtained through faulty searches, a stand that could put her with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his fellow conservatives.
Law professors who have examined her decisions as a judge say they see few signs that she is a liberal activist.
"I think she will be a moderate liberal who favors narrow decisions, not all that different from [Justices Ruth Bader] Ginsburg or [Stephen G.] Breyer," said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University. "Her opinions reveal her to be someone who respects the limits of the judicial role."
Frost and others predict Sotomayor would prove to be more like moderately liberal David H. Souter, the retiring New Hampshire jurist she would replace, than Justice William J. Brennan, the liberal whom Souter replaced in 1990.
