Stuart Taylor’s close study of the New Haven firefighters case (Ricci v. DeStefano) deepens his concern that Judge Sotomayor’s decisionmaking “may be biased by the grievance-focused mind-set and the ‘wise Latina woman’ superiority complex displayed in some of her speeches.” Some excerpts:
The [Second Circuit] panel’s decision to adopt as its own U.S. District Judge Janet Arterton’s opinion in the case looks much less defensible up close than it does in most media accounts. One reason is that the detailed factual record strongly suggests that — contrary to Sotomayor’s position — the Connecticut city’s decision to kill the promotions was driven less by its purported legal concerns than by raw racial politics.…
But the unmistakable logic of Sotomayor’s position would encourage employers to discriminate against high-scoring groups based on race — no matter how valid and lawful the qualifying test — in any case in which disproportionate numbers of protected minorities have low scores, as is the norm.
Such logic would convert disparate-impact law into an engine of overt discrimination against high-scoring groups across the country and allow racial politics and racial quotas to masquerade as voluntary compliance with the law.