This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 28, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown. The process has begun digging through years of writings and opinions of Sonia Sotomayor as she attempts

to become the next justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Roger Pillan, Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Cato Institute, offers his thoughts.

She was a child of the Bronx.

She grew up in relative poverty in the Bronx, raised by her mother after her

father died when she was nine years old. She did very well in high school, went to Princeton, graduated sumacum

Laude, then went to Yale Law School, wrote on the Yale Journal,

was an assistant district attorney in New York under Robert

Morgenthaw. She was a commercial litigator and then she was named to the

federal bench by George Bush Senior in something of a compromise that was reached when Daniel Moynihan recommended her in 1991 as a district court judge. Then she was nominated and confirmed by President Clinton to the Second Circuit.

Interestingly, 29 senators voted against her in the elevation to the Second Circuit.

So she was controversial by that time.

What is most striking about her writings as a judge and her work as an attorney.

She has refrained from taking positions

where you'd think that she might take positions

and none more clearly than this Ricci V. D. Stefano case that is before the Supreme Court

right now. This is a case coming out of New Haven, Connecticut, whereby a test was given to firefighters who

aspired to be officers and the results did not come out right.

In other words, they were such that the whites and one Latinos scored well and the African American test takers did not.

The plaintiff, lead plaintiff, is Frank Ricci,

who suffers from dyslexia.

He paid over $1, dollars to have someone transfer the test material onto

...