In discharging their constitutional duty to provide advice and, if they deem appropriate, give consent to President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Senators should examine the critical importance the president attaches to empathy as a judicial virtue and to Judge Sotomayor’s claim to be well-endowed with it. They will find that the president and the judge have exaggerated empathy’s significance, understated its ambiguities, and obscured fundamental judicial virtues.
On May 26, in his White House remarks introducing Judge Sotomayor, President Obama praised her “rigorous intellect” and lauded her conception of the “judicial role,” which involved “an understanding that a judge’s job is to interpret, not make, law; to approach decisions without any particular ideology or agenda, but rather a commitment to impartial justice; a respect for precedent, and a determination to faithfully apply the law to the facts at hand.”
