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Lecturer in Law Thomas C. Goldstein is quoted in Time Magazine in an article about Judge Sonia Sotomayor's stance on race-related issues:
Republican critics of Sotomayor are planning to use the Ricci decision as Exhibit A in what they hope will be confirmation hearings focused on her views about race. Exhibit B is a speech she delivered in 2001 that included the following 32 words: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Since President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to the court on May 26, that remark has become the main source of conservative attacks. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told his followers on Twitter that Sotomayor was a "Latina woman racist" who should withdraw. (He later apologized.) Sotomayor expressed regret about her word choice to Senator Dianne Feinstein. But after the Senate Judiciary Committee released Sotomayor's complete list of speeches, it emerged that she had delivered many versions of the same stump speech — seven by one count — between 1994 and 2003. In all of them, she suggested that a judge who was a "wise woman" or a "wise Latina woman" would issue a better opinion than a male or a white male judge.
Sotomayor's defenders say that those words were taken out of context and that her appellate opinions are hardly radical on race. Tom Goldstein of SCOTUS Blog has estimated that of the 96 race-related cases other than Ricci she heard on the Court of Appeals, "Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a [ratio] of roughly 8 to 1." (See the top 10 Supreme Court nomination battles.)