I'm not sure if everyone has been following the confirmation hearing for Judge Sonia Sotomayor. If you haven't heard about it, she is President Obama's pick to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Sotomayor is a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. If she is confirmed, she would the first Latino justice and the third female justice. She is Puerto Rican from the Bronx, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton for her A.B. and received her J.D. from Yale Yale School. She was the ADA in New York, and entered private practice five years later. She served on the board of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (now called LatinoJustice), the State of NEw York Mortgage Agency, and the NYC Campaign Finance Board. In 1991 is was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush, and was confirmed in 1992. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and was confirmed in 1998. Sotomayor has ruled on several high-profile cases.
However, she has handled only a small number of K-12 education cases during her 17 years as a federal judge. These cases focused on issues such as special education, racial discrimination, and student freedom of expression.
There are three prominent K-12 education cases from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which could show what position she would take on education issues is she is confirmed into the Supreme Court.
In 1999, Sotomayor dissented in part from the majority decision of Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education. In this case, the student's family claimed that their son, the only black student in his first-grade class at a Connecticut elemenary school, was subjected to racial slurs by other children and that he was transferred to a kindergarten class to alleviate the racial tension without the family's consent. Sotomayor agreed with the panel's rejection of the claim that the school reacted with "deliberate indifference" to the alleged racial hostility, but she also argued that the student's race stood out as the "likely reason" for his demotion from first grade to kindergarten.
In 2006, Sotomayor joined a unanimous ruling in Frank G. v. Board of Education of Hyde Park. This was a special education case that resembles the Forest Grove School District v. T.A. (2009) case that the Supreme Court just ruled on. Sotomayor joined the unanimous ruling that found that a family could be reimbursed for private school tuition for a child with a learning disability even if the child never received such services from the public district. In Forest Grove School District v. T.A., the Supreme Court made it easier for parents of students with disabilities to get reimbursed for private school tuition, which is aligned with Sotomayor's decision in the Frank G. v. Board of Education of Hyde Park.
In 2008, Sotomayor signed on to the decision which found that a Connecticut student's off-campus blog remarks, described in the ruling as "vulgar," had created a "foreseeable risk of substanital disruption" at the student's high school. In Doninger v. Niehoff, the panel did not grant the teenager a preliminary injunction to reverse the school's disciplinary action against her.
Of the 3,000 or so cases that have come before Sotomayor as an appeals court judge, less than 1% have been on schools. However, some education law experts say the available evidence suggests that she's a moderate on education issues. But at the same time, conservative groups view Sotomayor as a left-leaning activist seeking to use personal viewpoints to create legislation. Others desribe her case record as middle-of-the-road application of legal principles.
While this is similar to what many people are saying about her overall decisions, it seems to me that her decisions do follow a moderate viewpoint. Many are using her speeches to say that she is liberal because of her "wise latina" comment and other such comments made in six of her many speeches. I think it is important to look at her case rulings over her speeches and looking at that, it would appear as though Sotomayor is conservative on education issues. An analysis conducted by Zirkel found that of 26 decisions on "regular education," Sotomayor ruled in favor of school districts 83 percent of the time and ruled in favor of districts 58 percent of the time on her 13 special-education cases.
n Monday that makes it easier for parents of students with disabilities to get reimbursed for private school tuition.
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