“Bluntly put, she’s not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is, and her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire.”

That assessment of Sonia Sotomayor is just one part of an extraordinary letter that Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe sent to his protégé Barack Obama in early May 2009, three days after Justice David Souter announced his retirement.

Tribe’s letter is the subject of my new Confirmation Tales post. Some excerpts:

Tribe’s letter did not make waves during Sotomayor’s confirmation process for the simple reason that it did not become public knowledge until I received it and published it some 18 months later. But it provides interesting insight into the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that can take place as advocates of the competing contenders push their favorite….
When Obama ended up not following Tribe’s advice, Tribe deftly finessed. Two days after Obama announced his selection of Sotomayor, a New York Times article addressed concerns that she “has a blunt and even testy side” that (at least “to detractors”) “raises questions about her judicial temperament and willingness to listen.” In giving the White House’s answers to those questions, Tribe left the impression that he had supported her selection….
Tribe would go on to sign his name to a letter from more than one thousand law professors that described Sotomayor as a “brilliant, careful, fair-minded jurist” who was “an exceptionally well-qualified nominee to the Supreme Court.”…
After I published Tribe’s letter, Tribe claimed that “the reservations I expressed about Justice Sotomayor prior to her nomination were amply refuted by the closer study I was able to give her record before the president made his decision.”
If that were true, Tribe would surely have raced to retract his advice to Obama, right? There is no evidence that he ever did.

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