In her notorious 2001 Berkeley speech titled “A Latina Judge’s Voice,” Judge Sotomayor discussed what she called “Latino representation” in the federal judiciary. As she put it:
[W]e have only 10 out of 147 active Circuit Court judges and 30 out of 587 active district court judges. Those numbers are grossly below our proportion of the population.
I’m struck not only by Sotomayor’s blatant quota mentality but also by her comparing the percentage of Latino judges in the federal judiciary to the overall percentage of Latinos in the population—rather than to the percentage of Latino lawyers, or, better yet, to the percentage of Latino lawyers who had the age, experience, and other qualifications to be plausible candidates for federal judgeships.
What percentage of lawyers are Latino? According to the ABA, in 2000 the percentage of lawyers who were “Hispanic” was only 3.4%. If one were to play the quota game, then one might easily argue that Latinos were “overrepresented” in the federal judiciary, since the very numbers that Sotomayor complained about equate to 6.8% of federal appellate judges (double the percentage of Latino lawyers) and 5.1% of district judges (half again higher than the percentage of Latino lawyers). The disparity would presumably be greater if the pool of lawyers was limited by age and experience. (In 1990, only 2.5% of lawyers were Hispanic.)
One way to win at the quota game, of course, is to fudge the numbers. In this regard, I’ll note that the Hispanic National Bar Association recently stated that it represented the interests of some “38,000 U.S. Hispanic attorneys, judges, law professors, law graduates, law students, and legal professionals.” (See page 2 of this 2007 Supreme Court amicus brief.) That number seems to fit well with the overall estimate of some 1.14 million attorneys in the United States in 2007. But now, the HNBA suddenly claims to represent the interests of “the more than 100,000 Hispanic attorneys, judges, law professors, legal assistants, and law students in the United States and its territories.”