Supreme Court

Sotomayor’s Record on Race

Has only dissented from colleagues four times.

Sonia Sotomayor’s critics have zeroed in on a firefighter affirmative-lawsuit currently before the Supreme Court to allege that she shows racial favoritism, but does her record bear out the accusation? Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSBlog looks over all 96 cases dealing with race-related claims that she presided over. “Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions,” he writes. “Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous … Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge.” Conservatives may try to paint her as a radical, but in the cases involving race Sotomayor has only dissented from her colleagues four times.