AN OOZING SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT? “She absolutely would not show her card or check in; she felt like she shouldn’t have to.”

THE HILL: Baucus: ‘No idea’ how he’ll vote on Sotomayor.

RADLEY BALKO: Criminal Justice Missing From Sotomayor Hearings: No one cares to discuss the Supreme Court’s most important function: protecting the rights of the accused.

WAS SOTOMAYOR BOXED IN? And if so, who was the boxer?

LEGAL INSURRECTION: Yes On Sotomayor.

Plus, this from IowaHawk.

VIDEO: Dave Kopel and Ilya Somin testify on the Sotomayor nomination.

SOTOMAYOR: The vindication of Jeffrey Rosen? “The question is not whether Sotomayor will get through, but why the president felt so compelled to select her. If he was desperate to find a Latina, he should have found a wise one.”

(Via Randy Barnett, who comments: “When Rosen published his critique, I knew very little about Sotomayor. After forcing myself to watch much of the hearings, I wonder if those who criticized him then are having any second thoughts today.”)

ILYA SOMIN: The Sotomayor Hearings as a Step Forward for Property Rights. “A striking aspect of the Sotomayor confirmation hearing is that she got more questions about property rights than any other Supreme Court nominee in decades. In a post at the New York Times roundtable on the hearings, I explain why this is a good thing, despite the generally unimpressive nature of her answers:”

THE EMPATHY PARADOX: Sotomayor rejects Obama’s judicial philosophy. “You would expect someone who managed to get elected president to be at least as politically savvy as someone who’s spent the past 17 years on the bench. Why did Obama say he wanted judges with empathy–a statement so embarrassing that his own nominee was forced to repudiate it?”

SOTOMAYOR’S STUMBLES: Does this mean she won’t be confirmed? Nope. “None of this will affect her tenure on the Supreme Court, but it will provide further evidence that Obama has a big problem in selecting people for his administration, and that there seems to be little effort at vetting nominees for important positions. In short, every prevarication and stumble Sotomayor makes deepens the impression that Obama is not a competent executive. That’s the real danger for Obama in these hearings, and the tough questioning of Jeff Sessions and Lindsey Graham has made it a reality.”

ANN ALTHOUSE: Did you notice how Sonia Sotomayor has backed away from any identification with Obama’s notion that “empathy” is a component of judging?

UPDATE: Mike Seidman: “Yesterday, Judge Sotomayor explicitly repudiated the President.” But read the whole thing, as he has a deeper point. And there’s a response.

RANDY BARNETT: Sotomayor Again Misstates Fundamental Rights Doctrine. “This is both a grossly incorrect (and empty) understanding of the doctrine governing the protection fundamental rights and an inaccurate statement of the precedents concerning the incorporation of the right to keep and bear arms into the Due Process Clause of the Constitution.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS FACT CHECK: Don’t quote Sotomayor on that, Senator.

In endorsing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy did some creative rewriting of history. And he put quote marks around it.

Trying to head off criticism of a controversial comment, Leahy misquoted Sotomayor’s own words in kicking off the second day of her confirmation hearings. . . .

LEAHY SAID: “You said that, quote, you ‘would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would reach wise decisions.’”

THE FACTS: If that’s all Sotomayor said, the quote would barely have mattered to opponents of her nomination. The actual quote, delivered in a 2001 speech to law students at the University of California at Berkeley, was: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Leahy’s revision dropped the controversial part of the phrase, the part that has attracted charges of reverse racism.

Sotomayor said her words have been misunderstood. She said she intended to tell students that their experiences would enrich the legal system. But she softened her language Tuesday, say that no ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in judging.

I wouldn’t regard Leahy as a reliable source on these things.

Plus, Leahy explains his “wise Latina” misquote, but the video shows…

SOTOMAYOR’S PERFORMANCE GETS A BAD REVIEW FROM THE A.P.:

It’s a good thing Sonia Sotomayor speaks Sotomayoran.

After week upon week in which plenty of other people on the planet interpreted Sotomayor’s past comments, the Supreme Court nominee at last got a chance to deconstruct her own words Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Fingers splayed, palms flat, hands bouncing up and then deliberately pressing down to the table, Sotomayor elaborated, clarified, expanded, retracted.

She drew loopy circles on her paper; she ran rhetorical circles around her past words.

“I didn’t intend to suggest …” she explained.

“What I was speaking about …” she offered.

“As I have tried to explain …” she parsed.

“I wasn’t talking about …” she demurred.

She was a tough critic at times.

“I was using a rhetorical flourish that fell flat,” she averred.

“It was bad,” she said. Of her own words.

Democrats were only too happy to take Sotomayor’s rhetorical revisions at face value as she explained away the most problematic of her past remarks.

Ouch. There’s more. (Via Bookworm).

THAT HURTS: A bad review for Sotomayor from Prof. Louis Michael Seidman of Georgetown. “If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified.” On the notion of principles as dictating results, I agree with Seidman.

UPDATE: “To this point, it is impossible to tell from her responses whether she knows anything about constitutional law OR whether she simply does not want to offer any opinions that could possibly be criticized.” Though I suppose those aren’t mutually exclusive.

WASHINGTON POST: Eve Rodriguez: Sotomayor’s Unconvincing Backpedaling. “I’m surprised and disturbed by how many times today Sonia Sotomayor has backed off of or provided less-than-convincing explanations for some of her more controversial speeches about the role of gender and ethnicity in judicial decision-making.”

JOHN HINDERAKER on the “wise Latina” explanation.

UPDATE: Sotomayor on the Second Amendment. More here. She’s not that into it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more on Sotomayor and Heller. “Fundamentally, we have to realize that she’s replacing Souter. He wouldn’t be with us anyway. Not to mention, she’s hardly an intellectual leader. Listening to her answer other questions made that plenty clear.” Be careful. She might just be lulling you into a false sense of security. . . .

STILL MORE here.

MORE STILL: Randy Barnett: “One of the things we hope to learn during confirmation hearings is a nominee’s approach to the constitutional protection of liberty. But in her exchange with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) about the second amendment and its potential application to the states, Sonia Sotomayor revealed remarkably little about her understanding of how the Supreme Court protects liberty under the fourteenth amendment. For example, more than once she said a right was ‘fundamental’ if it was ‘incorporated’ into the fourteenth amendment. But this gets it backwards. The Supreme Court incorporates a right BECAUSE it finds it to be fundamental. When asked how she understands the criteria by which the court concludes that a right is fundamental, she did not give a substantive response. Then, when Hatch asked her about the difference between nineteenth century precedent involving the privileges or immunities clause and the twentieth century cases involving the due process clause, she said she did not recall the cases well enough to address the difference.”

If her politics were different, this would be clear evidence that she is unfit.

Plus, Ilya Somin: Sotomayor’s Misstatement of Kelo. Like I said . . . .

BYRON YORK: Will Republicans expose the two Sotomayors?

RANDY BARNETT: The Seinfeld Hearings: How Senators could, but probably won’t, make the Sotomayor confirmation a show about something.

SOME QUESTIONS FOR JUDGE SOTOMAYOR, from Sen. John Cornyn.

ANN ALTHOUSE AND SIX OTHER LEGAL EXPERTS pose questions for Sotomayor in the New York TImes.

THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY IS HOSTING AN ONLINE DEBATE ON THE SOTOMAYOR NOMINATION, featuring Thomas C. Goldstein, Wendy Long, Louis Michael Seidman, David Stras, and M. Edward Whelan III.

THE POLITICS OF PERSONAL DESTRUCTION? McClatchy: Sotomayor backers urge reporters to probe New Haven firefighter. (Via NewsAlert).

Well, it’s not like they’re going to be busy looking into her tax problems.

HMM: Sotomayor Enters Confirmation Process with Miers-Like Numbers. “Sonia Sotomayor will begin her confirmation hearings next week with some of the highest levels of public opposition of any Supreme Court nominee in the last two decades, according to a new poll by the CNN and the Opinion Research Corporation. In fact, only one nominee had a higher level of opposition: Harriet Miers, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005. Miers later withdrew her nomination under questions about her qualifications from both the political left and right.”

But there’s the difference. With Miers, the President’s own party made the biggest stink. The left won’t say a single bad thing about Sotomayor.

TAXPROF: Does Judge Sotomayor Have A Tax Problem?

UPDATE: Related item here.

TAXPROF: Judge Sotomayor’s Law Practice: A Tax Dodge? Always happy when one of my tax thoughts makes TaxProf. But I was just following Ralph Winter’s advice from my Business Associations class in law school: When you see a business arrangement that doesn’t seem to make any sense, just say “it’s probably for tax reasons,” and you’ll be right nine times out of ten.

LEGAL ETHICS — and journalistic ethics.

STUART TAYLOR: “The Supreme Court’s predictable 5-4 vote to reverse the decision by Judge Sonia Sotomayor and two federal appeals court colleagues against 17 white (and one Hispanic) plaintiffs in the now-famous New Haven, Conn., firefighters decision does not by itself prove that the Sotomayor position was unreasonable. . . . What’s more striking is that the court was unanimous in rejecting the Sotomayor panel’s specific holding. Her holding was that New Haven’s decision to spurn the test results must be upheld based solely on the fact that highly disproportionate numbers of blacks had done badly on the exam and might file a “disparate-impact” lawsuit — regardless of whether the exam was valid or the lawsuit could succeed.”

SUPREME COURT DECIDES RICCI: “The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.”

UPDATE: “Although there is a sharp 5-4 divide among the justices, not a single justice thought that Judge Sotomayor acted correctly in granting summary judgment for the City of New Haven.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

Further thoughts from Roger Pilon (”In its opinion today in Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court came down solidly for upholding the equal protection of the law.”) and Ilya Shapiro. (”Ricci is a victory for merit over racial politics—which is appropriate given that the ruling overturns a lower court panel that included Sonia Sotomayor.”)

Plus, more at Workplace Law Profs.

L.A. TIMES: GOP TO PRESS SOTOMAYOR ON GUN RIGHTS. But the story by James Oliphant and David Savage calls it a “divisive issue.” I wonder if they’d use that term for more PC rights? I mean, polls pretty consistently show that about 3/4 of Americans think the Second Amendment gives them a right to own a gun, and the Supreme Court has said so, too. So how “divisive” is that, really?

JOE HICKS: Sotomayor and Holder: Racists or Racialists?

HEH: Sotomayor: My women-only club isn’t discriminatory but I’m quitting it anyway.

ILYA SOMIN: “Eduardo Penalver, a prominent property scholar, has written an interesting, but I think ultimately unsuccessful defense of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s ruling in the Didden case.”

ILYA SOMIN: What the Didden Case Tells Us About Sotomayor’s Attitude Towards Property Rights.

“TROUBLING GAPS” in Sotomayor’s questionnaire.

JONAH GOLDBERG ON SOTOMAYOR: She’s not a racist, she’s a racialist!

I WOULD HOPE THAT A WISE WOMAN would not keep recycling the same speech year after year.

SOTOMAYOR AND THE UNMANLY MAN.

CAN SOTOMAYOR AVOID answering questions about Ricci?

“NORTH AMERICAN CONGRESS” AND “MAINLAND CONGRESS,” two terms used by Sonia Sotomayor in her senior thesis at Princeton.

THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES. I opened comments on the Rush/Sotomayor/abortion post, so let’s see what Insta-readers do with a hot topic. I’ll moderate quickly and liberally, and I won’t miss the commenters who get misfiled as “spam” by WordPress — as I did for that last post until just a few minutes ago. Carry on!

“IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HEAR ABOUT the suit, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is what ‘fair use’ is, and what Section 107 of the Copyright Act says and all that Mel Nimmer kind of crap but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. I don’t really write this blog for people who don’t know that kind of stuff already.” But you really do want to click on that link if you want to know why Sonia Sotomayor had something to do with why J.D. Salinger filed his lawsuit in the Southern District of New York.

ON THE RADIO JUST NOW, RUSH LIMBAUGH toyed with the idea of supporting Sonia Sotomayor — on the theory that, raised as a Catholic, she might be secretly pro-life. Is it a risk Obama would have taken? Perhaps it is. I assume the Democratic Party would do very well if the Supreme Court happened to overrule Roe v. Wade.

ADDED: “I think she is a woman who is well-steeped in the law and well-steeped in precedent. And I believe that she has a real respect for precedent, and that she was not just saying that. And if that is really true, then I would agree with her. And I believe it is.” The Senator attests too much, I think.

AND: I think I’ll try another comments experiment on this one. I noticed that Dr. Helen was impressed that, on my previous experiment, there was “no anger, mudslinging or trolling.” But there also wasn’t really a topic, other than commenting per se. This post is much more of a challenge. I’ll be moderating — with a light hand. Stay on topic, and let’s see how good the discussion here can be.

YET MORE: I’ll have to listen again in the podcast of the radio show, but I suspect Mr. Fastbucks is right when he says: “This is reverse psychology. He’s baiting the libs into a litmus test on her.”

ARCHITECTURE AND SOTOMAYOR. Not all high-rise housing projects are bad.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Libertarians vs. Conservatives: Two Different Approaches to the Sotomayor Nomination.

EMPHASIZING FEDERALISM VALUES and adherence to Supreme Court precedent, a unanimous 7th Circuit panel, consisting of Easterbrook, Bauer, and Posner, adhering to Supreme Court precedent, says that the 2d Amendment is not incorporated in the 14th Amendment and thus does not apply to the states. It remains to be seen what the post-Heller Supreme Court will say, but — as I say in the linked post — the panel makes a clear and elegant argument for decentralized decision-making about the scope of the right to self-defense. ALSO AT THAT LINK: “Ah, the gods of Supreme Court confirmation are smiling on Sonia Sotomayor. Now, I will place my bet that the white firefighters will lose Ricci v. DeStefano.”

COMPARING SOTOMAYOR TO JUDGE PICKERING. “It has helped leading liberals and Democrats to discover that being tarred as a racist on flimsy grounds is unfair and deeply unpleasant.”

LEGAL REALISM. A new/old bugaboo for Sotomayor opponents. I would love to have a sophisticated national dialogue about Legal Realism (which is much-discussed here at the University of Wisconsin Law School), but so far it looks as though the discussion will not be too sophisticated. It’s pretty much: she talked about Legal Realism, Legal Realism is judicial activism, and judicial activism is judges imposing their own political preferences, so Sonia Sotomayor is unfit for the Supreme Court. But, as University of Chicago lawprof Brian Leiter said:

“Everybody who knows anything knows that Legal Realism is a description of what judges really do… I give [Sotomayor] a lot of credit, frankly, for talking about it openly. It’s unusual for a sitting judge to say it openly, because judges don’t want to attract the political heat from acknowledging what everyone already knows, which is that appellate judges especially have to make new law – that they can’t just apply the law as written.”

I would love to have more Supreme Court Justices who say what they really think. Imagine if, when reading a “decision,” we were actually reading the decision.

TOM GOLDSTEIN: Judge Sotomayor and race.

Plus, some thoughts on the “wise Latina” brouhaha from Ann Althouse. “It was not an unguarded spontaneous outburst. It was a carefully written speech delivered to a particular audience. Sotomayor was saying the things that would be well-received by her audience. . . . What Sotomayor said was actually a weak, feel-good version of the kind of racial talk that is widespread in the legal academy.”

THE LATEST PJM POLITICAL includes me on Judge Sotomayor, and valuable shaving advice from James Lileks.

BOB OWENS: Sotomayor: Obama’s End Run on the Second Amendment.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Sotomayor and the Problem of Affirmative Action.

EUGENE VOLOKH: “Wise Latina” speech: troubling.

President Obama agrees.

UPDATE: Latinos for impartiality.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Paul Harper writes:

Is it just me or does the administration seem to be very, very much on the back foot right now? Maybe it’s Kim, maybe it’s the appalling jobless figures, the debt, failed treasuries, or something the Chinese said, but it looks to me like the WH is very much looking for some enemies to blame.

The initial ‘be exceedingly careful’ preemptive attack failed completely to divert attention from the ‘wise Latina’ statement. As a result, the administration can’t rely on patterns of accusations that worked extremely well in the past. Are the Brits the new French?

I think it a big mistake to underestimate the President’s mind-control powers, however, especially over the press. I expect pliant Dems will give him everything he wants. Republicans are currently rudderless.

Well, the press covers for people until it stabs them in the back. Will that happen with Obama? Probably, eventually. I think they hope to put it off 5 or 6 years . . . . Meanwhile, the backtracking probably doesn’t help.

MORE: From James Taranto, an Archie Bunker analogy. Plus, “the infamous ‘douche bag’ case.”

POLITICO: White House concedes Sonia Sotomayor misspoke in 2001.

UPDATE: Associated Press: “Sotomayor did not live her entire childhood in a housing project in the South Bronx — she spent most of her teenage years in a middle-class neighborhood, attending private school and winning scholarships to Princeton and then Yale. And Sotomayor’s life and lifestyle after law school largely resemble the background of many lawyers who rise to powerful positions in Washington.” But there’s also this: “Her ethnic consciousness was apparent in the earliest days of her career, in the New York City prosecutor’s office.”

ILYA SOMIN: Sotomayor May be Wrong About Race, but She is No Racist.

Related post here.

SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Closet sovereigntist?

FROMA HARROP: Sotomayor and Condescending Identity Politics. “The important part of Sotomayor’s time at Princeton wasn’t her struggle as a Bronx-raised, working-class Puerto Rican among the Ivy League flowers. After all, Sotomayor did attend a good private Catholic high school. (And had she been born of poor Chinese immigrants, little fuss would have been made of her academic success.) The essence of Sotomayor’s Princeton experience was that she graduated summa cum laude and went on to Yale Law School, where she was an editor on the law journal.”

Related item here:

This is a story of privilege, dammit, not adversity.

Show me a Montana girl of un-useful ethnicity who put herself through law school waiting tables, after being left with two young children when her Army husband was killed overseas, and I’ll start oohing and aahing over her compelling story.

Of course, such a person would never ever end up on any President’s short-list, no matter if she graduated first in her class at her non-Ivy institution, no matter how extreme the intelligence and dedication and hard work she displayed over the subsequent course of her career. That’s simply how the world — and especially the legal world — is constructed today.

Largely true, alas.

FROM C-SPAN, the full 35-minute video of Judge Sotomayor at Duke Law School.

ANN ALTHOUSE: Do we know what Sotomayor thinks about abortion rights? “Some people assume Obama wouldn’t have picked her if she doesn’t support abortion rights, but is that really the case?”

RASMUSSEN: 87% Expect Sotomayor Will Be Confirmed, 45% Say She Should Be.

WENDY KAMINER on Sotomayor and Sisterhood.

FORBES: Is Sotomayor Really Anti-Business? “The Didden decision is likely a red herring–not a ‘red flag.’”

UPDATE: Related: Comments from Jeffrey Rosen. More on Rosen here.

And is Obama pursuing a Harriet Miers strategy? There was a strategy with Harriet Miers?

ON NPR, my colleague Jeff Hirsch looks at Sotomayor’s 1995 baseball ruling.

I THINK HE’S ENJOYING THIS TURNABOUT THING: Gingrich: Sotomayor ‘racist,’ should withdraw nomination.

Robert Gibbs, meanwhile, thinks people should be careful about what they say. Where have I heard that before?

UPDATE: Ah, Politico is remembering the same thing:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs issued a pointed warning to opponents of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination Wednesday, urging critics to measure their words carefully during a politically charged confirmation debate. . . .

In 2001, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer drew criticism in the press for suggesting Americans “need to watch what they say” in the overheated aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

But that was a scary threat of totalitarian censorship. Well, to Frank Rich, anyway.

HOWARD KURTZ: Secretly Selling Sotomayor. “While the Obama administration is hardly the first to use background briefings, journalists have complained about the ground rules several times this year. Reporters for the AP, New York Times and Washington Post, among others, objected at yesterday’s session for print journalists.” Hope, change, and transparency!

SOME QUESTIONS FOR SOTOMAYOR, from George Mason University law professor Neomi Rao. And some more from Coast Guard Academy law professor Glenn Sulmasy.

SOTOMAYOR’S APPOINTMENT AS A consolation prize for the abandonment of comprehensive immigration reform?

MORE ON SOTOMAYOR: Damon Root writes on Why libertarians—and everyone who believes in limited government—should worry about Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.

Plus, a roundup from The Anchoress, and a debate on Judge Sotomayor’s savings between Greg Mankiw and Tom Smith.

And, Jan Crawford Greenburg on how it happened.

Also, Kerry Howley on the cruel tyranny of wise Latinas.

A SUPREME COURT THAT LOOKS LIKE AMERICA: If America were 2/3 Catholic.

UPDATE: Er, no. “Think we’ll see a cartoon like this regarding the Sotomayor appointment?”

OBAMA’S “WISE LATINA:” Walter Olson on Sotomayor.

RICHARD EPSTEIN on the Sotomayor pick.

UPDATE: Heh: “I can’t even work up any outrage at this kind of tokenism. It’s expected, like her being a Princeton/Yale Law alumna. Just once in my life I’d like to see a president nominate to the court a graduate of, say, University of Tennessee Law School. That would be diversity. Instead, she’s just another Ivy Leaguer. Yawn.” Hey, don’t expect me to disagree . . . .

Plus, from Dave Kopel: “Judge Sotomayor’s record suggests hostility, rather than empathy, for the tens of millions of Americans who exercise their right to keep and bear arms.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: On the other hand, Kopel debunks a “highly dubious” charge against Sotomayor. “There is no reason to believe this is true. The purported source is ‘American News Inc.’ The link to this alleged news source is dead. In a quick Internet search, I found no such organization.”

ILYA SOMIN ON THE SOTOMAYOR PICK: “My general sense is that she is very liberal, and thus likely to take what I consider to be mistaken positions on many major constitutional law issues. I am also not favorably impressed with her notorious statement that ‘a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.’ Not only is it objectionable in and of itself, it also suggests that Sotomayor is a committed believer in the identity politics school of left-wing thought. Worse, it implies that she believes that it is legitimate for judges to base decisions in part based on their ethnic or racial origins. . . . On the plus side, Sotomayor does meet the minimal professional qualifications for nomination to the Supreme Court. Her ten years of service on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ensures that. At the same time, her record is far less impressive than that of most other recent nominees, such as Roberts, Alito, Breyer, and Ginsburg. Each of these was a far more prominent and better-respected jurist than Sotomayor, and Breyer and Ginsburg were leaders in the development of their respective fields of law. Sotomayor also seems far less impressive than Diane Wood and Elena Kagan, reputedly her top rivals for this nomination.”

Plus, thoughts from Roger Kimball.

OBAMA WILL NOMINATE Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

UPDATE: Jim Lindgren: “Compared to recent nominees, Sotomayor is a far more distinguished choice than was Harriet Miers (whom I opposed), but a less distinguished choice than John Roberts — and probably Samuel Alito as well. I expect Sotomayor to be confirmed, but without too much enthusiasm, except in a few pockets of the Democratic coalition.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Ann Althouse.

PAUL MIRENGOFF: The Testiness Test:

Aggressive questioning of advocates at oral argument is hardly a vice; often it is a plus. Naturally it’s better for judges not to get testy with the lawyers, and certainly the lawyers should be permitted to answer. But judges are human and come with varying demeanors. This variation is evident, for example, on the current Supreme Court.

Nothing I have read about Sotomayor’s demeanor and questioning at oral argument remotely suggests that this set of concerns makes her an objectionable nominee. There really shouldn’t be a “niceness” test for judges and Justices, and judicial temperament in an appellate judge should be measured almost exclusively by what the judge writes in opinions, not by how he or she questions from the bench.

Well, lawyers get unhappy with judges suffering from “black robe fever,” but that’s really only a severe problem in trial-court judges. Plus, this take: “Really, does anybody care if lawyers are intimidated?”

JEFF ROSEN: The Case Against Sotomayor.