Last week, the Senate voted to confirm Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, making her the third woman ever to sit on the country’s highest court.
The vote, 68-31, was largely on party lines: She earned the votes of all Senate Democrats and just nine Senate Republicans. Sotomayor will be seated on the bench in September.
Women’s-rights advocates have hailed Sotomayor’s confirmation as a progressive victory — many had been saddened when Sandra Day O’Connor retired in 2006, leaving Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the sole woman on the bench.
For the 10-week confirmation, activists, supporters and critics of Sotomayor discussed what a woman — and a Hispanic — would bring to the court.
As a dual-minority, Sotomayor is likely to make a difference in a specific area of cases — racial and gender discrimination.
According to several studies and law scholars, having a judge who is a racial and/or gender minority has an impact primarily on racial- and gender-discrimination cases. (Not surprisingly.)
Research has also found that having a woman on a panel of judges has more of an impact on the ruling than just having a female judge, suggesting that a woman’s presence on the bench actually influences the opinions of her peers.
So, yes: The hope is that Sotomayor will bring her experience of growing up as the daughter of a widowed mother and a minority in the Bronx, to attending two Ivy League schools, to the cases before her.
Despite any influence she might have on the Supreme Court, the racial and gender disparities on the bench are still stark: The percentage of minority and women judges are far fewer than the general population. In 2009, there are presently 213 women federal judges of a total 798, or about 27 percent. African Americans comprise 11 percent of the federal judges but make up 13.5 percent of the population.
The numbers for openly LGBT judges are nearly impossible to find.
Though Sotomayor has a sparse record of LGBT cases, she sat on a three-judge panel in 2006 that found in favor of a gay man who sued his employer for discrimination based on sexual stereotyping under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans discrimination based on gender.
This is actually significant to the LGBT community because, until there is a federal law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, Title VII is the only law that affords gays and lesbians some protections, particularly when individuals don’t conform to male and female gender stereotypes.