Props to Andrew Sullivan's blog for posting a reader's comments that detail more of Judge Sotomayor's background.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.co...
The Case was Pappas vs. Guiliani.
From Wikipedia:
Facts
Thomas Pappas was dismissed by the New York City Police Department for anonymously mailing from his home racially offensive political materials to political and other groups that had solicited him for donations. Pappas was fired for mailing out the material. The Appeals court held that the Police Department’s action had not infringed on the plaintiff's Pappas’s rights under the First Amendment.[1][2]
[edit] Sotomayor dissenting opinion
Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the majority's decision to award summary judgment to the police department. Although Sotomayor acknowledged that the speech was "patently offensive, hateful, and insulting," she warned the majority about "gloss[ing] over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives just because it is confronted with speech it does not like."[3]
Sotomayor argued that Supreme Court precedent required the court to consider not only the NYPD's mission and community relations but also that Pappas was neither a policymaker nor a cop on the beat. Moreover, Pappas's speech was anonymous, "occur[ring] away from the office on [his] own time." She expressed sympathy for the NYPD's "concerns about race relations in the community," which she described as "especially poignant," but at the same time emphasized that the NYPD had substantially contributed to the problem by disclosing the results of its investigation into the racist mailings to the public. In the end, she concluded, the NYPD's race relations concerns "are so removed from the effective functioning of the public employer that they cannot prevail over the free speech rights of the public employee."[3]
You can read the actual court report here: http://1stam.umn.edu/...
The initial reader only took a few minutes to find this, certainly says something about the blatantly stupid method of confirming justices in a public sphere.
I should not be doing this, and it is a sad display of how bad our American discourse is that we can level charges of this kind to Supreme Court Nominees.