"And some may see Sotomayor's letter as evidence that she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities. She now sits on Princeton's Board of Trustees."

And normal people read Stuart Taylor Jr. and see a smug, mendacious defender of torture, war crimes, and GOP lawbreaking, while conservatives read Stuart Taylor Jr. and see one of their own.

Interesting story, Too bad it depends almost exclusively on the well known expert "Some Say"

Having dealt with your sources, accepting as factual the historical portion, I find your conclusions beyond ludicruous.

How many "Summa Cum Laude" degrees would she need to achieve for you to stop projecting.

Well, this is definitely the smoking gun that should finally cause Sotomayor to withdraw.  We can't have ungrateful minorities like this on the Supreme Court.  We need a Court that is objective and impartial, and contains only justices like Samuel Alito-- i.e., former members of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, the group that was formed as a reaction against the admission of women and minorities in the first place.  Princeton began admitting women in 1969, and already had a couple of minorities, so anyone who saw an "institutional pattern of discrimination" in 1974 was clearly predisposed to look for the worst.

Ah yes.  The United States in 1974 was a perfect bastion of equal opportunity for all.  When exactly did princeton start admitting women?

I look forward to Mr. Taylor extending his investigation into Ms. Sotomayor's past into her junior high school years.  Really, why stop at when she was 20; surely she did something in her teens that would disqualify her!

Also, although my windbag-to-English translation book isn't handy at the moment, I wonder what "she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities" really means -- perhaps something like, "We let you in -- shut up and be grateful"?

Apparently, uppity women and minorities keep making Mr. Taylor's life uncomfortable by not knowing their place.

And she also had the balls to earn more and higher academic awards than that petulant slug Alito.  How dare she think that intelligence, experience, and competence trumps ties to the bushies?

Oh, yes.  November 2008.

I note that the seminar came only after the letter.  Perhaps the letter led the university to conclude that she had a point.  Or, perhaps, since she "initiated" it, she decided it was better to do something to address the issue rather than merely to complain about it.

Either way, I have a pretty hard time with the analysis here.  First, it presumes that she should have been so grateful for being granted the boon of admission to Princeton that she should not have complained about any shortcomings she found there.  I'm not sure I can think of a single college student who meets that standard.

Second, I don't see any evidence she was wrong.  That would seem to be relevant to "whether she was predisposed to" anything.  Her admission to the university is not, mind you, a demonstration that she was wrong; as she points out, the total number of Latinos on campus was pretty small, and the applicant numbers don't suggest any meaningful outreach to the Latino community.

Third, she was a sophomore at the time she wrote the letter.  Should we now prowl through everything Mr. Taylor did when he was a sophomore to see if perhaps it was not something he would do now that he's a fully-formed adult?

Collapse

Stuart, let's see your letters to the Princetonian.  Since you're casting aspersions, it might be nice to know what your relation to the university as an undergrad was. 

Why is this piece called "Analysis"? There's no analysis here.

How can we put someone on the Court who has shown a commitment to the rights of minorities? Obviously the only sorts of Justices that should be appointed are ones who like the world just as it is.

By the way, using that criteria would have made Thurgood Marshall ineligible. Surely he should have been happy with his place and never tried to make the world more just. For shame, Marshall and Sotomayer.  It is self-evident that accepting racial hierarchy is proof of one's objectivity and lack of bias.  Only those who see anything wrong with the world are non-objective, eh?

Wait--  she was admitted to Princeton, and then excelled at academics, worked to make the university a better and more just place, and went on to a brilliant legal career.  Doesn't that actually sound good?  I mean, except for the unbecoming nature of her little ethnic problem. 

And how can we have a Justice who in 1974 complained about gay students having their room ransacked in terms like these:

No matter how much one may disagree with the Gay Alliance or the policies they are advocating, no matter how repugnant one may find homosexuality, the manner of expressing this opposition should be intellectual. At this university we are dedicated to persuasion by reason, not by brute force.

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/05/15/23734/

She stood up against ransacking and invoked reason - scandale!  Why was she out there not appreciating all that was good and great abotu Princeton? What a complainer.

In the latest piece of wingnut kabuki theater, the racists use the word 'racist' as a code word for 'undesirable minority we are going to try to keep out'.

None of these people were worried in the slightest when it was discovered that Alito was a member of CAP, a group formed to keep women and minorities out of Princeton. Why on earth do they think they are going to be take seriously?

Senate Republicans are already running away from this conspicuous racism in droves.

Some may say that Stuart Tayor is a closet racist who hates the other and wishes that the little brown and black people take the scraps they're given and be grateful for the opportunity to get scraps at all.

And some may see that Stuart Taylor is just regurgitating GOP talking points in a failed attempt to demonize this intelligent and respected Latina judge as someone who doesn't bow down to the white establishment as is proper.

Personally, I think it's a bit of both.

See,  this is exactly the kind of thing Sam Alito's  Concerned Alumni of Princeton was trying to prevent 35 years ago...a brilliant Hispanic Princeton women sitting on the Supreme Court

Baaaaah! Stuart, come home!

 Those opportunities ultimately came to include her admission to the university that she so sharply attacked.

When colleges and universities admit students they do so with the goal of educating those students to be effective citizens in a complicated democracy and to become leaders of the communities in which they live.  As a college professor (I know, someone by definition disbarred from political. discourse by wingnuts) let me just say that the willingness of Sotomayor to take a leadership role in challenging the university to pursue its own ideals is a sign of that both Princeton and Sotomayor were succeeding.

Your comment, by the way, is my new favorite entry in the "what's the most anti-democractic thing Stuart Taylor can say," derby.

Some may.......

Stuart thinks and feels all that follows "Some may" in his "analysis" piece above. However he knows that those thoughts and feelings  are factually incorrect and also plainly bigoted, so he very cleverly hides behind those unnamed people who have have not been quoted,  have not even been interviewed, are not even aware of that letter from the 1970s, have not even read this "analysis piece" with block busting information and probably would not even feel what Stuart attributes to them. 

But we all know, don't we?

By the way, what does Stuart think of Samuel Alito's membership in CAP?

"And some may see Sotomayor's letter as evidence that she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities. She now sits on Princeton's Board of Trustees."

You seem to believe that Sonia Sotomayor was being in some way ungrateful (?) by criticising what she considered to be insufficient minority hiring and student recruitment at Princeton in 1974. As if by Princeton's willingness to do her the favour of "providing her with so many opportunities" (opportunities she earned through hard work and academic excellence) she has some sort of obligation not to criticise the institution.

It seems to me that this would utterly defeat the purpose of educating her. Or anyone.

If a young Puerto Rican student at Princeton doesn't have the right, to speak her views on issues she feels strongly about, then what good is a Princeton education going to do her anyway? I'm sure you can't see that there is a twisted racial logic to your argument, but I'd ask you to look at it again - according to your argument it would be impossible for any minority student to oppose policies that she believed harmed others who come from a similar background. The first Jew at a university would have no standing to point out unwitting anti-semitism in the teaching staff. The first women admitted to an all male club would have no right to demand facilities more suitable for women.

She doesn't owe them her gratitude. She owes them her truth - the same thing she will owe us all when she is a member of the Supreme Court. I'm glad to know that she stood up for herself (and in such a reasoned, fact base way - with numbers) then, because it gives me hope that she might stand up for each of us on the Court. Every individual is a minority of one, you know.

Collapse

<i> And some may see Sotomayor's letter as evidence that she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities. She now sits on Princeton's Board of Trustees. </i>

You know, simply writing "uppity" would have been so much more concise.  But I do admire how this formulation could be used to undermine so many other prominent attorneys who worked to make this country a better place:

"And some may see Thurgood Marshall's advocacy in Brown v. Board of Education as evidence that he was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the country that had afforded him such opportunities....."

And your comments on Alito a few years ago

"Alito's critics have similarly ignored much evidence that his 15 years of steady, scholarly, precedent-respecting work as a judge tell us more about him than a handful of widely (and misleadingly) publicized memos that he wrote more than 20 years ago."

As Lawyers, Guns and Money says...

"So, if I understand correctly, memos Alito wrote directly about important constitutional issues while applying for an important government job should be disregarded, but letters that Sotomayor wrote as a student are somehow important despite their utter lack of relevance to any discernible constitutional issue. And I must have missed Taylor's series of posts giving Sotomayor's opinions the most moderate possible reading. But I'm sure he has deeply principled reasons for all this!"

A conservative white male named Stuart Taylor gave another conservative white male Sam Alito a different standard of review than he's affording to Sotomayor?

Say it isn't so!