A day after the Supreme Court reversed the Second Circuit's ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano, the left-leaning Alliance for Justice issued its fourth and final report analyzing Sonia Sotomayor's opinions. The group saved the most controversial cases for last, focusing this time on Sotomayor's constitutional and civil decisions, including Ricci, the gun rights case Maloney v. Cuomo, the voting rights case Hayden v. Pataki and a handful of decisions touching on the issue of abortion. Prior Alliance reports have examined her rulings in criminal law and business and consumer cases.

While the group doesn't officially take positions on nominations, the Alliance's legal experts were quick to come to Sotomayor's defense on Ricci.

"There are two obvious points" making it "hard to see how Ricci would be much of an issue in the confirmation process," said the group's legal director, William Yeomans. Since the Supreme Court majority opinion in the case announced a new standard for interpreting Title XII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Yeomans said, there was no way Sotomayor could have applied it as an appellate judge at the time she heard the case. Yeomans added that the justice she will replace if confirmed, David Souter, ruled with the liberal dissenting judges.

As evidence that Sotomayor does not always side with any one ethnic group, Jennifer Meinig, a researcher with the Alliance, pointed to King v. American Airlines Inc., in which Sotomayor wrote the opinion of a unanimous panel rejecting a claim of racial discrimination brought by two African Americans after they were bumped from a flight.

In the gun rights case that has conservatives up in arms -- Maloney -- Sotomayor joined a panel in affirming a lower court's ruling that the Second Amendment doesn't apply to the states. Alliance senior fellow Megan McCloskey said this decision was recently validated by a 7th Circuit ruling from conservative judges Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner.

Sotomayor's record on abortion is limited, McCloskey said, noting that the nominee has never considered a direct challenge to a legislative restriction on abortion. A number of her cases, however, have "shown a real sensitivity to privacy rights and family planning rights," McCloskey said.

This was apparently not true, however, of Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush, in which Sotomayor rejected a challenge to the Bush administration's "Mexico City Policy" banning the use of federal funds for abortions abroad. Natalia Sorgente, another Alliance researcher, wasn't pleased with this ruling: "It was a little bit of an unsatisfying opinion because those were claims that could have gotten a robust analysis, and rather than doing that she sort of resolved them with reference to precedent."

Yeomans was quick to assert, however that this ruling simply reflected the nominee's judicial restraint. "Those are claims where a less-restraining judge might well have gone into a discussion of substantive issues, and Sotomayor chose not to," he said.