A couple of weeks ago, Tom Goldstein of the SCOTUS Blog pointed out that the debate over Sotomayor's qualifications seemed to ignore the single most important source of information about her legal thinking: the opinions she's written while serving as a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. While fools like Jeffrey Rosen love to focus on gossip, innuendo and b.s., the rest of us are fortunate to have a detailed, extensive, and public trove of data to analyze. Even better, Goldstein's crew has pulled together summaries of what they consider Sotomayor's most important civil decisions. A sampler is below:
Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143 (2d Cir. 2002)... involv[ed] an employee of the New York City Police Department who was terminated from his desk job because, when he received mailings requesting that he make charitable contributions, he responded by mailing back racist and bigoted materials. On appeal, the panel majority held that the NYPD could terminate Pappas for his behavior without violating his First Amendment right to free speech. Sotomayor dissented from the majority’s decision to award summary judgment to the police department. She acknowledged that the speech was "patently offensive, hateful, and insulting," but cautioned the majority against "gloss[ing] over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives just because it is confronted with speech is does not like."
[I]n Ford v. McGinnis, 352 F.3d 382 (2d Cir. 2003), Sotomayor wrote an opinion that reversed a district court decision holding that a Muslim inmate’s First Amendment rights had not been violated because the holiday feast that he was denied was not a mandatory one in Islam. Sotomayor held that the inmate’s First Amendment’s rights were violated because the feast was subjectively important to the inmate’s practice of Islam.
Sotomayor’s dissent in Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education, 195 F.3d 134 (2d Cir. 1999), is perhaps her most strongly worded opinion addressing discrimination. Plaintiff Ray Gant, who was transferred mid-year from first grade to kindergarten because of academic difficulties, alleged that the school was deliberately indifferent to racial hostility that he suffered and discriminated against him through the transfer. Sotomayor agreed with the majority’s decision to dismiss the racial harassment claim, but she rejected their conclusion that the transfer was not race discrimination. In her view, the transfer was "unprecedented and contrary to the school’s established policies": white students having academic difficulties, she noted, received compensatory help, whereas Gant - the "lone black child" in his class - was not given an "equal chance" but was instead demoted to kindergarten just nine days after arriving at the school.
[S]he authored a forceful dissent in Hankins v. Lyght, 441 F.3d 96 (2d Cir. 2006), a case involving a minister who filed suit under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) after he was forced by his church to retire at the age of 70. The district court dismissed the claim; on appeal, the Second Circuit reversed, holding that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which - subject to certain exceptions - prohibits the government from substantially burdening the exercise of religion, had effectively amended the ADEA by providing a defense for ADEA violations. In her dissent, Sotomayor complained that the majority had "violate[d] a cardinal principle of judicial restraint" when it - unnecessarily, in her view - held that the RFRA was constitutional.
In a case involving privacy issues, Leventhal v. Knapek, 266 F.3d 64 (2001), Sotomayor wrote an opinion that rejected a Fourth Amendment challenge to a public employer’s search of an employee’s computer after the employee was accused of being late, coming to the office infrequently, and spending his free time discussing personal computers with his coworkers. Although she agreed that the employee had a "reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his office computer," Sotomayor also cautioned that "workplace conditions can be such that an employee’s expectation of privacy...is diminished." Here, she explained, the search was permissible because it could have revealed employee misconduct.
Many more case summaries on a wide variety of topics are available at the link.