That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post, part 3 in my series on Ricci v. DeStefano. (And I’m not done yet.) From my opening:
No Supreme Court case has ever loomed more ominously over an aspiring Supreme Court justice than Ricci v. DeStefano did over Sonia Sotomayor in 2009.
Oral argument in Ricci took place just before Justice David Souter announced his retirement. The case weighed on White House lawyers during the weeks that Barack Obama took to select Sotomayor for Souter’s seat, and it hung over the first month of her nomination. When the Court did rule, a five-justice majority emphatically repudiated Sotomayor’s position, and even the four dissenters disagreed with the standard that she adopted and with her bottom-line judgment. Even more starkly, the careful and extensive consideration in the majority and dissenting opinions contrasted sharply with Sotomayor’s dismissive one-paragraph treatment of the legal claims.
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