The Case Against Sotomayor

[Brittain33]

What everyone knows and what is right are obviously two different things.

Judges make policy. It's not something "bad" judges do, it is an unavoidable part of the job. The Constitution does not provide literal instructions for every possible case that can come before a court. How a judge interprets the law is how he or she creates policy. You may consider one approach a better approach, but it is simply a different form of the same act.

[Torie]

The criticism of Rosen is that according to his own accounts, some of his private sources had problems with Sonia, and then hooked him up with sources close to her that THEY selected, all anonymous, and then used it to write a smear piece that profoundly affected her life while all factual elements in his article are simply false. 

For such a controversial story, there are people who are willing to go on the record, relying on cherrpicked anonymous gossip seems unethical journalistically.

px75's Salon link is the best.

I don't think repeating such gossip is unethical, as long as their is full disclosure that the sources have a bias so should be taken as dispositive. Do you disagree with that?  Why should Rosen "know" the buzz, yet have some duty not to share it?

Because Rosen claims that the people who provided these negative comments/smears on Sotomayor are ''prominent liberal scholars'' but we are unable to verify that because they all speak in anonymity. For all we know they might have an invested interest into seeing somebody else picked for the Supreme Court and they are willingly lying in order to sabotage Sotomayor (like Rosen himself apparently).

And as Greenwald says if they are indeed prominent legal scholars and not lawyers or clerks, then there is no excuse for them for refusing to talk on the record. Except of course if they want to lie and smear, and they want to do it with impunity.   

Of course there is also the problem of Rosen's own bias which showed mostly at his previous article where he questioned Sotomayor's intelligence and character, even though he admitted that he hasn't read any of her opinions. And not only that, but his main argument for her supposedly mediocre legal skils turned out to be completely false. And when he was caught he refused to apologize and instead offered some silly excuse about how there is a subliminal criticism somewhere in the footnote of judge Winter, which can only be perceived by Rosen's anonymous sources.

And it's funny how Rosen failed to find one person to speak positively about Sotomayor when so many other journalists had no such problem. And they all spoke on record of course.
 

I guess I give a bit more credence to  Rosen than you based on my experience, with him in the past,  but I take your point. You think he was out to do a hatchet job, and may be disingenuous when he ascribes a certain gravitas to his sources, which may in fact be absent. That may be true. We may never know for sure. In any event, it would be a mistake to rely on just one guy's opinion/sources anyway; the check is that others will pipe up. Stereo "sounds" better than "mono" obviously (a couple of terms from the past of an old for you there ).

[Torie]

What everyone knows and what is right are obviously two different things.

Judges make policy. It's not something "bad" judges do, it is an unavoidable part of the job. The Constitution does not provide literal instructions for every possible case that can come before a court. How a judge interprets the law is how he or she creates policy. You may consider one approach a better approach, but it is simply a different form of the same act.

The "funny" thing is that in fact that is far more true about the law in general than most layman might imagine. The human experience is just so complex, that mere language (legal or otherwise) cannot possible capture all the possible hypotheticals, some of which sometimes turn into a case or controversy down the road, so there is imprecision and ambiguity. That is one of the main reasons as to why lawyers make the big bucks. 

[Ogre Mage]

This is an excerpt from a piece Rosen wrote in 1995:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/opinion/mediocrity-on-the-bench.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/J/Judges

Rosen is laboring under the delusion that excellence and diversity are mutually exclusive.  His assessment of Diane Wood was wrong as she is now widely regarded as an outstanding judge and writer of opinions, not to mention one of the top-tier candidates for the Supreme Court.

Between this and his question to then AG nominee Eric Holder, he clearly has a bias problem.