First Latina Supreme Court nominee: Some of her most noteworthy work

Judge Sotomayor’s most high-profile case, Ricci v. DeStefano, concerns white firefighters in New Haven who were denied promotions after an examination yielded no black firefighters eligible for advancement. Joining an unsigned opinion of a three-judge panel of the appeals court, Judge Sotomayor upheld the rejection of a lawsuit by white firefighters, one of them Hispanic, claiming race discrimination and, as part of the full appeals court, she declined to rehear the case. The Supreme Court is currently considering the case, and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is the likely swing vote. Among the questions in the case is whether the law should treat diversity in the work force differently from diversity in the classroom. Judge Sotomayor dissented in part in an earlier case, Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education, finding that race discrimination had occurred when a school demoted a black child from first grade to kindergarten.

“The school did not give the black student an equal chance to succeed (or fail).”

—Dissent in Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education, 1999

Related Documents

• Ricci v. DeStefano (2008)

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• Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education (1999)

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An opposition memo on Judge Sotomayor cites her ruling in a case about lawsuits against federal contractors to claim that she is “willing to expand constitutional rights beyond the text of the Constitution.” The case concerns an inmate who lived in a fifth-floor room while serving a federal prison sentence for securities fraud. He was allowed to use the elevator because of congestive heart failure, but when a guard had him climb the five flights, he had a heart attack, fell down the stairs and suffered an injury. He sued the company that ran the halfway house for the federal Bureau of Prisons. As part of the appeals court, Judge Sotomayor emphasized precedents that permitted suits against companies performing state government functions. The Supreme Court reversed Judge Sotomayor, ruling 5 to 4 that only individual agents, not corporations, may be sued for such violations. Justice Stevens – joined by Justices Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer – dissented.

“Extending Bivens liability to reach private corporations furthers [its] overriding purpose: providing redress for violations of constitutional rights.”

(Bivens was a 1971 Supreme Court case that allowed some people whose rights have been violated by federal agents to sue.)

—Makesko v. Correctional Services Corporation, 2000

Related Documents

• Makesko v. Correctional Services Corporation

In a defeat for environmental groups, the Supreme Court ruled this term that the Environmental Protection Agency may use cost-benefit calculations to decide whether to require power plants to make changes that could preserve aquatic organisms. The case mostly concerned the meaning of a phrase in the Clean Water Act that requires the power plants’ cooling structures to “reflect the best technology available for minimizing adverse environmental impact.” Judge Sotomayor had previously ruled that weighing the costs of the changes against the value of the organisms in dollars was not permitted by the law. Instead, the EPA could consider only what cost “may reasonably be borne” by the power plants. When her ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter, dissented, saying that cost-benefit analysis was prohibited by the law and pernicious in practice.

“Congress has already specified the relationship between cost and benefits in requiring that the technology designated by the EPA be the best available.”

—Riverkeeper v. Environmental Protection Agency

Related Documents

• Riverkeeper v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007)

Some of Judge Sotomayor’s more prominent opinions on discrimination concern people with disabilities. In one case, Judge Sotomayor ruled that a law school graduate with a reading and learning disability was entitled to extra time in taking the bar exams. After the Supreme Court decided that people are not protected under the Americans With Disabilities Act if they can function normally by wearing glasses, taking medication or otherwise compensating for their disabilities, it told the Second Court to reconsider its decision in this case. Judge Sotomayor again found that the woman was disabled, and must be given accommodations, writing that test scores alone were not enough to diagnose a disability. Another case concerned a trucking company that rejected applicants who were taking some medications. Judge Sotomayor dissented from the majority, writing that Hunt, the company, had determined the applicants were “substantially limited in the major life activity of working,” and not, as the, majority found, merely “unsuited for long-distance driving of Hunt’s 40-ton trucks on irregular stressful schedules.”

“By its very nature, diagnosing a learning disability requires clinical judgment.”

—Bartlett v. New York State Board of Law Examiners

Related Documents

• Bartlett v. New York State Board of Law Examiners (1999)
• E.E.O.C. v. J.B. Hunt Transport (2003)

Some of her Judge Sotomayor’s most notable decisions have come in child custody and complex business cases. One case concerned a child of divorced parents who lived in Hong Kong. The mother had sole custody of the child and the father had “reasonable access.” The mother took the child to New York, and the father filed a petition for return of the child to Hong Kong. A custody order said the child could not be removed from Hong Kong without the consent of the father or the Hong Kong court, and the case centered on whether this clause confers “rights of custody” under the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. If it did, it would require the child’s return to Hong Kong. On appeal, the court ruled the removal was not wrong because the father did not possess rights of custody. In her dissenting opinion, Judge Sotomayor argued that a broader interpretation of “custody” was more in line with the “object and purpose” of the Convention, and that this was how foreign courts had considered the issue. The question in this case, Croll v. Croll, is before the Supreme Court in Abbott v. Abbott. Another case concerned jurisdiction. Federal courts can hear cases between “citizens of a State and citizens or subjects of a foreign state.” According to British law, citizens of Bermuda are “nationals,” but not “subjects.” A panel found, therefore, that federal jurisdiction did not apply. Judge Sotomayor dissented, writing that the Constitution used “citizen” and “subject” to refer to a range of relationships.

“The people of Bermuda would be undoubtedly surprised to learn that they are ‘stateless’ ”

—Koehler v. Bank of Bermuda

Related Documents

• Dissenting Opinion, Croll v. Croll (2000)
• Koehler v. Bank of Bermuda (2000)

Judge Sotomayor rejected a claim that a New York ban on a martial arts weapon (a nunchuka) violated a man’s Second Amendment rights, explaining the Second Amendment only applies to the federal government. In this case, Maloney v. Cuomo, the court noted that the Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down parts of the District’s gun control law, did not invalidate this principle, and “to the extent that Heller might be read to question the continuing validity of this principle,” earlier Supreme Court rulings took precedence in the case.

“The Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose on this right.”

—Opinion of the court, including Judge Sotomayor, Maloney v. Cuomo (2009)

Related documents

• Maloney v. Cuomo

On the Circuit Court, Judge Sotomayor has been involved in few controversial issues like abortion. In one case, she denied a claim brought by an abortion rights group challenging a Bush policy that prohibited foreign organizations that receive foreign funds from performing or supporting abortions. Another case concerned the definition of “refugee,” which includes victims of coercive family-planning practices. The Second Circuit ruled that this definition does not extend to unmarried partners of women forced to abort their pregnancies. Judge Sotomayor joined a concurring opinion which said it was unnecessary to consider whether the definition extended to legal spouses, because this particular case dealt with Chinese men and their girlfriends, not their wives.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position.”

—The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush

Related Documents

• CRLP v. Bush (2001)
• Lin v. Department of Justice (2007)

Walczyk v. Rio (2007)

In this case, which concerned a longstanding property dispute and references to a potential “blood bath,” Judge Sotomayor wrote a separate opinion on “qualified immunity,” under which an officer cannot be found liable for behavior that was objectively reasonable under existing law.

Hankins v. Lyght (2006)

Involves a minister forced to retire at age 70, and age discrimination. Judge Sotomayor dissented, writing that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act does not apply to employment suits against religious institutions by their leaders.

Krimstock v. Kelly (2002)

Ruled that after an automobile is seized in a criminal case (for example, the cars of those accused of drunk driving), a prompt hearing must be held to determine whether the vehicle can be held, pending the actual forfeiture hearing.