It is one thing to say that all of the justices bring their own histories and experiences to the courtroom. It’s quite another to insist that one’s background gets witlessly translated into votes on specific issues. Surely that’s not a hard distinction to figure out. After all, the whole point of judging is to leverage what one knows about the world and to compensate for what one doesn’t know. It’s exceedingly hard to do it, and judges don’t always succeed. But if we think there’s no possibility that judges will at least try to step out of the bounds of their experiences, it’s not entirely clear why we have courts in the first place. It must be possible to say that Judge Sotomayor—who presumably has had some experience with discrimination, some sense of the dilemmas faced by people without means—might help enrich the justices’ deliberations without assuming that her identity will translate into specific kinds of votes.
Word.
The rest.
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