Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, pointed to Sotomayor's extensive tenure on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals as the most appropriate basis to examine her judicial thinking. "The best evidence" of her future rulings can be "drawn from ones she's already made," Henderson said, not "her ethnicity or empathy or gender."

Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy and contributor to the National Review Online Bench Memos blog, isn't so sure Sotomayor's opinions offer the best window into how she could ultimately perform as a jurist on the high court. He said her speeches, most notably the one containing her "wise Latina woman" comment, offer a better glimpse into her philosophy than her written opinions from the bench, in which she is restrained by precedent. Appellate court judges are bound by precedent in a way that high court justices are not, Whelan reasoned.

New York University law professor Cristina Rodriguez agreed with Henderson that Sotomayor's appellate record should be the "most important evidence of how she would be as a judge" but agreed with Whelan that she is constrained by precedent and predicting how she'll rule as a justice based on that record is difficult. "She's going to have much more freedom on the Supreme Court," Rodriguez said. "We don't really know what kind of Supreme Court justice she will be. Most justices are very different at the end of their careers than what people expected them to be at the beginning."

On the issue of "empathy," Henderson noted that Samuel Alito wasn't criticized for saying in his confirmation process that he would be a more sensible jurist because of his immigrant background, and neither was Clarence Thomas when he said that growing up in poverty informed his judging. Henderson also pointed to the fact that Brown v. Board of Education was decided by nine white male justices as proof that race and ethnicity are not predictors of the way a justice will rule.

Rodriguez agreed, arguing that Sotomayor "is no less capable of seeing the other [the white male's] side of a discriminatory claim than a white male is capable of seeing a non-white man's side of a discriminatory case."

Whelan lauded Sotomayor's life story as "inspiring," but, he said, "the challenge is always to make sure that you're not indulging your experience in an improper way."

The panelists, moderated by Slate.com senior editor Dahlia Lithwick, commended Sotomayor's background as a trial court judge and noted that the only current justice with that level of experience is retiring Justice David Souter. "It's a weakness [not to have trial court experience] when you're crafting rules that need to be administered by trial judges," Whelan said. "It's a weakness when you're trying to understand what happened at the trial level."