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ALBUQUERQUE — University of New Mexico law professor Laura Gomez remembers the exact time last Tuesday she heard the news that President Obama had nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“My alarm went off right at 7 a.m. and NPR was announcing that she was about to be appointed,” Gomez recalls. “I couldn’t believe it was really happening. I was really thrilled.”
Gomez, an Albuquerque native who attended Harvard as an undergraduate and then Stanford for both a law degree and a doctorate in sociology, says she expected Obama to select someone else even as she hoped Sotomayor would get the nod.
“Obviously I knew that was a possibility,” she adds. “I guess I was surprised.”
Meanwhile, Briana Zamora, Bernalillo County’s newest Metropolitan Court judge, awoke similarly last Tuesday.
“The morning I heard the news, it almost brought me to tears. I was overjoyed to say the least,” Zamora says.
It’s unlikely that such reactions to the first-ever Latino nominee to the Supreme Court are uncommon in New Mexico, the state with the nation’s largest Hispanic population at more than 44 percent. But neither are they universal.
Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez, a Republican, reacted much more coolly.
“I wasn’t giddy,” the veteran prosecutor says. “I went, ‘Oh, OK. Now let’s figure out who this lady is.”
As the spotlight focuses on the trailblazing Sotomayor and her record, including 17 years as a federal judge in New York, a range of contentious issues revolving around ethnicity and gender — from interpreting the law to identity, and, of course, politics — all seem poised to play a large role in Sotomayor’s confirmation process.
The fact that the nation’s first African-American president picked Sotomayor is revealing, according to UNM law professor Margaret Montoya.
“I didn’t think Obama was going to take the risk of appointing her because she is a risky appointment,” Montoya explains. “It is going to cause him some trouble, and I think it forces him to go to a certain location that he’s not particularly comfortable — the role race has played in his own assertion to power.”
Even so, Montoya sees Sotomayor’s open embrace of her roots — the daughter of Puerto Rican parents who grew up in a Bronx public housing project — as a strength that is easily misunderstood by critics.
“I think she’s very good at explaining that background doesn’t determine the outcome; background informs the kinds of choices a judge makes about what facts are important,” Montoya, a 1978 graduate of Harvard Law School, explains.
“Because I think that in law when we are telling the story of the dispute, how facts are heard necessarily resonate within the lives that we’ve lived. I don’t think that’s identity politics. I think that’s the way our minds work, the way we sort information.”
Much has been made of a 2001 speech Sotomayor gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in which she stated that personal biography does in fact play a role in decision making and concluded that “our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”
While that might be controversial in some circles, Zamora, 35 and a graduate of UNM’s school of law, doesn’t think it is.
“That’s easy,” she beings. “Obviously, because our backgrounds and our ethnicity and our gender play a role in how we are as a judge, it doesn’t mean we’re not going to follow the law. At the same time, that’s why we bring diversity to the bench.”
Rebutting the suggestion from some that Sotomayor is an “affirmative action” pick or lacking “the right intellect,” Gomez sees political pitfalls for Republican opponents of the nomination if they pursue that line of attack against the Princeton- and Yale-educated Sotomayor.
“On one level, it’s funny because it’s so outrageous,” Gomez says, noting that Sotomayor not only attended elite institutions of higher learning, but she thrived there graduating at the top of her class. “I think it may end up doing tremendous damage to the Republicans.”
Martinez, the Republican prosecutor often touted as a potential statewide candidate for higher office, acknowledges that GOP opposition to Sotomayor must be “artful” and rooted in “concrete examples.” Even so, she offers her own measured critique of leaning on gender or ethnicity.
“I think your upbringings and cultural background brings perspective to everyday life,” she says, “but when you talk about the law it has to be applied in an objective, fair manner, not in an objective Hispanic female manner.”
Legal disputes must be adjudicated as impartially as possible, Martinez adds.
“It’s either in the law or it isn’t. It’s either in the facts or it isn’t,” she says. “A Supreme Court decision has to be a decision based on law, not on emotion.”
Others, like Montoya, don’t see the work of a judge the same way and say they look forward to the coming debate over Sotomayor’s views and past writings.
“She’s talking about a certain mental process that is connected to identity. a mental process about choices that judges make,” Montoya says. “I’m extremely excited that we’re going to have a national conversation about why biography matters, and how biography intersects with history, about how biography is a story that is the memory of a family and a community.”
