The Sotomayor Hearings: A Waste of Time? NYTimes.com Friday, July 17, 2009 July 15, 2009, 4:21 pm By The Editors Judge Sonia Sotomayor in confirmation hearings this week explained (many times) what she meant by her “wise Latina” remark, defended herself against charges of being a bully on the bench, and tried to navigate carefully through discussions about abortion and gun control. She strove to be as circumspect about her views as possible, while the Senate Judiciary Committee members played their preset roles as defenders and interrogators. We asked some legal scholars and others who’ve been following the hearings what’s the most interesting thing they’ve learned. And if the hearings have revealed nothing new about Judge Sotomayor or her questioners, do they still hold some other kind of value? Alan M. Dershowitz, Harvard Law School Charles Fried, former U.S. solicitor general Heather K. Gerken, Yale Law School Philip K. Howard, Commongood.org Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com Tom Goldstein, founder, SCOTUSblog Elie Mystal, Above the Law Ilya Somin, George Mason University School of Law Olati Johnson, Columbia Law School Posturing and Hypocrisy Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is the author of many books, including, “Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights.” For the most part confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justices bring out the worst in the senators and in the nominee. The Sotomayor hearings are worse than most. Senators pretend to be outraged by the thought that a judge might be influenced by ethnicity, gender, religion, political affiliation or other such factors. The nominee pretends that she misspoke, or was misunderstood, when she acknowledged, in a moment of candor, that her Latina background might put her in a better position to understand certain legal or constitutional issues. Senators pretend to be outraged that a judge might be influenced by her background; and a nominee pretends she misspoke. Every practicing lawyer knows that these external factors matter — and matter a great deal. Any lingering doubt was put to rest forever by the Supreme Court’s shameful performance in Bush v. Gore, where five Republican justices voted like five Republican politicians, casting aside their own precedents and their constitutional obligation to do justice without regard to the identity of the litigants. I know of no honest lawyer who believes the case would have come out the same way had the party affiliations of the litigants been switched. Oliver Wendell Holmes once wisely observed that the job the lawyer is to predict what the courts will do in fact. Lawyers are paid enormous sums of money to make these predictions. Among the most salient items of information a lawyer needs to predict accurately are precisely the factors that the senators and the nominee claim should make no difference in the outcome of cases. It is precisely because these factors matter so much that it is important to have individuals from different backgrounds on the Supreme Court.