This is all over the Internet already, but apparently she’s admitted she benefited from affirmative action. The NYT has the scoop, complete with Sotomayor spouting the usual garbage about “cultural bias” in testing, which “statistics” have proven.

I also really liked Todd Zywicki’s post on the “wise Latina” remark, which puts the underlying sentiment in its academic context. The last sentence in this quote is the best:

That idea — that your background can make you a “better” judge — is, in my personal opinion, a silly idea that mischaracterizes the proper view of a judge. Nonetheless, it is a perfectly mainstream view in the academy and legal profession today — which I suspect accounts for how uncontroversial her statements seemed when they were uttered at places like Berkeley. Anyone who has attended a faculty workshop in the past decade at least wouldn’t bat an eye when someone says something like she said. It is sort of lowbrow legal realism, perhaps tinged with a bastardized critical race studies view of the law, taken to its extreme.