Not the black guy

The New York Times has a blog posting by Jeff Zeleny about the new nominee for the Supreme Court:

President Obama will nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court. If confirmed by the Democratic-controlled Senate, Judge Sotomayor, 54, would replace Justice David Souter to become the second woman on the court and only the third female justice in the history of the Supreme Court. She also would be the first Hispanic justice to serve on the Supreme Court.
Conservative groups reacted with sharp criticism on Tuesday morning. “Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order, who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written,” said Wendy Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network. “She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one’s sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.”
The president reached his decision over the long Memorial Day weekend, aides said, but it was not disclosed until Tuesday morning when he informed his advisers of his choice less than three hours before the announcement was scheduled to take place. Mr. Obama telephoned Judge Sotomayor at 9 p.m. on Monday, officials said, advising her that she was his choice to fill the Supreme Court vacancy. Later Monday night, Mr. Obama called the three other finalists— Judge Diane Wood of Chicago, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Solicitor General Elena Kagan— to inform them that he had selected Judge Sotomayor. White House officials worked into the night to prepare for the announcement, without knowing who it would be.
Judge Sotomayor has sat for the last eleven years on the federal appeals bench in Manhattan. As the top federal appeals court in the nation’s commercial center, the court is known in particular for its expertise in corporate and securities law. For six years before that, she was a federal district judge in New York.
In what may be her best-known ruling, Judge Sotomayor issued an injunction against major league baseball owners in April 1995, effectively ending a baseball strike of nearly eight months, the longest work stoppage in professional sports history, which had led to the cancellation of the World Series for the first time in 90 years.
Born in the Bronx on 23 June 23 1954, she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of eight. Her father, a factory worker, died a year later. Her mother, a nurse at a methadone clinic, raised her daughter and a younger son on a modest salary. Judge Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976 and and attended Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She spent five years as a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office before entering private practice.
But she longed to return to public service, she said, inspired by the Perry Mason series she watched as a child. In 1992, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended the politically centrist lawyer to President George H. W. Bush, making good on a longstanding promise to appoint a Hispanic judge in New York.
On the Circuit Court, she has been involved in few controversial issues like abortion. Some of her most notable decisions came in child custody and complex business cases. Her most high-profile case involved New Haven’s decision to toss out tests used to evaluate candidates for promotion in the fire department because there were no minority candidates at the top of the list.
She was part of a panel that rejected the challenge brought by white firefighters who scored high but were denied promotion. Frank Ricci, the lead plaintiff, argued that it was unfair he was denied promotion after he had studied intensively for the exam and even paid for special coaching to overcome his dyslexia. The case produced a heated split in the Circuit Court and is now before the Supreme Court.

Rico says it's going to be an interesting process, but you know you're getting older when people nominated to the Supreme Court are younger than you...