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Judge Sotomayor's temperment
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
05/29/09 2:46 PM EDT
There’s a surprisingly tough story in the New York Times today on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s temperament. It echoes Jeffrey Rosen’s New Republic article which I referred to in my Wednesday Examiner column on Sotomayor. She evidently asks a lot of tough and abrasive questions from the bench, and sometimes cuts off counsel in mid-sentence.
Which reminds me of an observation I made some time ago. The most persistent questioners on the current Supreme Court are the two justices who grew up in New York City, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Sotomayor would be the third justice to grow up in New York City. All three are products of the outer boroughs: Justice Scalia grew up in Queens, Justice Ginsburg grew up in Brooklyn (where she graduated from James Madison High School, the alma mater also of New York Senator Charles Schumer and former Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman) and Sotomayor grew up in The Bronx.
Another thought. Much has been made of Judge Sotomayor’s having grown up in a public housing project. But at least it had indoor plumbing, unlike Justice Clarence Thomas’s boyhood home in Pin Point, Georgia.
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