Anyone who would contend that corporate apologist John Roberts is in any way more "objective" than Ms Sotomayor is kidding themselves. Every individual, unavoidably, brings his or her own background and values to the job, any job. The most we can ask of any potential jurist is that he/she have the intellectual capability to (a) know and understand the law, and (b) know and understand their own predilections, and develop a capacity to stand back and exercie as much objectivity as possible.

I think Sotomayor was correct, if somewhat less than careful, when she made her infamous statement that a "wise Latina" would be capable of deeper understanding and better decision-making than a "white male." I think it's undeniably true, throughout history, that the less-privileged members of every society have much greater insight into social reality than their more comfortable "superiors." Her mistake was to lump all "white males" together ~ I'm a white male, but am most definitely NOT one of those "Fortunate Sons" with whom Ms Sotomayor would uusually find herself in disagreement.

Perhaps her life experience has predisposed her to see all white folks as rich, overprivileged, comparatively clueless, and unjustly predisposed to favor established and corporate power over the individual citizen. After all, she went directly from the overwhelmingly Black-and-Hispanic South Bronx to the Ivy League, then law school, and then directly to high-level prosecutorial positions and judicial clerkships and the federal bench. She probably has very limited experience of rubbing elbows with salt-of-the-earth white folks who are living from paycheck to paycheck.

And ~ to change the subject just a bit ~ all this neoconservative nonsense to the effect that "activist judges" are somehow wrong to "make law rather than to interpret the law" is a bunch of horse-hockey. Cases only GET to the Superme Courth because there is some ambiguity about how existing law should be applied. Any ruling, one way or the other, establishes precedent and therefore creates "new law" ~ new meanings or aspects of existing laws. That much is true whether the impact of a decision is progressive or reactionary or anything in between.