Analysis on new SCOTUS pick

I liked this panel from the NYT, and have copy+pasted a few choice excerpts below, with comments.

Indeed, the bare fact that she is a Latina tells us little about what sort of Supreme Court justice she would be, or how her presence would affect the dynamics of the Court, though her views have likely been shaped by who she is and how her life has unfolded.

Yeah. Exactly. Wouldn't it be nice if, one day, we stopped caring about the sex or race of appointees or leaders of any kind and asked, instead, "So...what's her record?" rather than "So...what interest groups does she energize?"

The next panelist makes this point better than I:

Long ago in dealing with corrective justice, Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics insisted that justice depended not on who was rich or poor, or even who was a good or bad person, but on the conduct of the two parties relative to each other. The point of his observation was not to explain the grounds on which cases should be decided, but to make sure that extraneous considerations were not allowed to intrude into a dispute.

The President’s choice of Judge Sotomayor seems to invert that historical relationship between corrective justice and individual traits in ways that are inconsistent with any serious defense of the rule of law, for which blind — i.e. impartial — justice is surely a better measure. By reputation at least, Judge Sotomayor is not regarded as a strong judge. It seems sad that extraneous considerations of gender and ethnicity seem to have swept everything else aside.

Oh. This next one is great.

Judge Sotomayor has a compelling life story. She exceeds all the conventional standards. At the same time her extraordinarily diverse range of experiences shows how very thin those standards have been. Her nomination is path-breaking because it tells us that President Obama wants all Americans to feel part of our system of laws, not just as litigants but as among the ultimate legal interpreters.

Because arbitration by majority rather than law is SUCH a great idea. This writer also made the point that, in earlier supreme courts, racism as a perspective influenced cases like Dred Scott. The intricacies of that case aside, I think we can generally agree. But I don't think that the solution to an imbalance one way--toward racism against blacks--is to imbalance on the other end, toward racism against whites. This is the very problem with "all Americans acting as ultimate legal interpreters": the whim of majority rather than stability of law determine a case's outcome. Somebody shoot me. (Don't worry...if the country wades further into confusion, somebody certainly will.)