Yesterday, the Senate approved Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. The final vote was 68-31, which was a closer margin than John Roberts (78-22) but less divisive than the Alito approval vote (58-42). Few people doubted her eventual confirmation, and the distribution of the final vote was nothing short of predictable and expected. Only time will tell which Sotomayor will write opinions as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court: the judge who believes in the power of empathy and experience or the Supreme Court nominee who describes her judicial philosophy as “fidelity to the law.” In the meantime, David Bernstein from VC has a comical response to a NY Times writer who claims that Sotomayor is about to “take on one of the most demanding jobs in the land”:
Let’s see. Each Justice has to write eight or nine opinions a year, plus several dissents or concurrences, with the assistance of four law clerks. While doing so, they manage to write books, lecture, and take the Summer off. Justice Thomas travels the country in his Winnebago. Other Justices have cushy lecturing jobs in Europe. Some elderly Justices almost literally have to be carried out of the Court when they die or become mentally incompetent, because the job is so “demanding.” It’s hard to see how an 89 year old Justice Stevens could keep up if he had the “one of the most demanding jobs in the land.”
Powerful? Yes. Intellectually challenging? Yes. Stressful? It would stress me out to have to decide, e.g., whether abortion would be legal, but the Justices seem to cope a lot better than I would, and they do have a lifetime job and no boss, which eliminates two major sources of stress for many people. Among the most demanding in the land? Hardly. My impression is that many lower court federal judges work much harder year-round than the average Supreme Court Justice.
Interestingly enough, the man who wrote the original NY Times piece, Adam Liptak, is the Supreme Court Correspondent of the New York Times!
As far as the most demanding job in Washington goes, I would case my vote for White House Chief of Staff. You’re basically the second most powerful man in the world, you work non-stop ridiculous hours, and you have to take care of all the small details at which the President can wave his hand. Most Presidents go through multiple Chiefs of Staff. I give Rahm until after the 2010 midterms.
That’s a pretty humorous insight! I’ve been building a timeline of the major events in Sotomayor’s life at http://timelines.com/topics/sonia-sotomayor. Anyone is free to contribute to it and enhance it with images, videos, or commentary.
Our idea is to create an interactive historical record of anything and everything, based on specific events that combine to form timelines. We’re trying to achieve a sort of user-created multimedia encyclopedia, in which no event is too big and no event is too small, and where each event can contain various types of resources, such as video, images, maps, etc. It’s also a good way to direct traffic to your blog because your events will pop up along with anything else that’s thematically related. We’re also planning on creating an embeddable version of our timelines in the near future.