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About Me
- SA Mora James, JD
- Lincoln/Omaha, Nebraska, United States
- Latina civil rights attorney seeking 'Justice for All' and Legal Consultant. Also, I am the current President of the Nebraska Hispanic Bar. I am admitted to practice in the following courts: Courts of the State of Nebraska - 1992; United States District Court for the District of Nebraska - 1992; United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit - 1994; United States Supreme Court - 2006. MORA JAMES LAW represents a very diverse array of individuals, businesses and institutions with widely varying legal needs. Our Practice Areas include providing top quality legal services or legal consulting both in state and federal courts regarding the following areas of the law • Employment Law • Civil Rights Law • Criminal Defense • Investigations • Class Actions • Disability Law • Domestic Partner Law • Family Law • Juvenile Law • Litigation • Personal Injury • Tort Law
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University of Illinois Professor Robin Kar, a former clerk to Judge Sonia Sotomayor. He is a Great Admirer of this Lady.
ReplyDeletePrawfsBlawg.blogs.com
On the Brilliance of People like Judge Sonia Sotomayor and Barack Obama
By Professor Rob Kar
May 5, 2009
On the Brilliance of People like Judge Sonia Sotomayor and Barack Obama
Professor Kar is a Professor of Law and Philosophy, and the Thomas Mengler Faculty Scholar, at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, beginning in the Fall of 2009. He is a former clerk to Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
Some excerpts :
Let me start with the obvious conclusion that anyone would draw if they were to get to know Judge Sotomayor and her work both intimately and deeply: she is an absolutely brilliant jurist and an absolutely brilliant person. Having clerked for her, worked very closely with her over the course of a year, and then known her well for more than a decade, I have a very good take on who she is both as a judge and as a person. Ordinarily, I would not weigh in on things like this, but, given some of the spurious comments that have been emerging from people who are less familiar with her, I feel a need to set the record straight.
I count myself privileged to have worked closely with some of the very best minds in the world, in both law (at Yale Law School and in the legal academy) and philosophy (at both Harvard College and the University of Michigan’s graduate school, which was widely considered the best department in ethics in the world when I was there.) Judge Sotomayor stands out from among these people as one of the very brightest; indeed, she is in that rarified class of people for whom it makes sense to say that there is no one genuinely smarter. (Others who have stood out in this way in my experience would include Harold Koh, the former dean of Yale Law School, and Peter Railton, a moral philosopher at the University of Michigan.)
Judge Sotomayor is much smarter than most people in the legal academy, and much smarter than most judges who are granted almost universal deference in situations like this. And while I have worked with numerous people who are thought of as some of the best minds in the nation, and about whom the question of brilliance would never even arise, most of them are—quite frankly—pedantic in comparison.
Indeed, Judge Sotomayor reminds me in some ways of Obama himself in that she has surprising dimensions to her brilliance, which are completely original to her. She knows how to pull out the best in people with whom she works, how to motivate people through her words and conduct, and how to forge deep and abiding relationships with people from all walks of life, and from all political stripes and ideologies. She is courageous and fearless, but non-ideological, and wholly unimpressed by the kind of pomp and false theoretical excess that can sometimes make one look smarter in the short term but only at the expense of distorting the underlying issues.
One measure of the extraordinary judgment she has is reflected in her incredible life story: she moved unerringly, and without any hint of doubt or hesitation, from the Bronxdale Public Housing Projects to graduating summa cum laude from Princeton, where she received the Pynes Prize (for their top graduate), and then to Yale Law School, the DA’s office, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
The force of character that it takes to live such a life should never be underestimated: we have no other person on the bench with her experience and intellect who has come from these beginnings and who has developed with such clarity of purpose and vision. The federal judiciary houses a number of intellectual giants, but, if we are honest with ourselves, we will have to admit that almost none of them would have made it to where they are from her starting point. The temptations to take other paths would have been far too strong, and the absence of hope too stultifying. Because of this, she also has the power to lift people up, and inspire.
Her story can bring unique hope to many for whom there is only despair; can help heal some of the deepest internal crises of faith that people struggling in this country have had to face; and can establish the fact (about which there is still far too much unwarranted skepticism) that brilliance comes in many surprising forms. She can also give a concrete face to the American promise, and what we stand for as a country, and to the kind of change that will bring us directly back to our core human values.
Like Obama, there is thus something special and incomparable about this woman—though it lies in qualities that are not always seen by those who do not know just where to look. In my view, the level of conviction and independence of mind that Judge Sotomayor displays is absolutely essential to the best work of a Supreme Court Justice, but it is in short demand, and rarely have we seen it on such full display in the federal judiciary.
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