SCOTUS Hearings: Sotomayor Backs Off on Empathy; Experts Allege Weak Grasp of Law, GOP Thinks She's Lying!

From Ann Althouse, "Did You Notice How Sonia Sotomayor Has Backed Away From Any Identification with Obama's Notion That "Empathy" is a Component of Judging?"

Also, check Ed Morrissey, "Sotomayor’s So-So Reviews Thus Far."

Plus, Glenn Reynolds is rounding up commentary from the legal community AND it's devastating. For example, Randy Barnett, "Mike Seidman on Sotomayor":

On the Federalist Society Online Debate on the Sotomayor hearings (click here and scroll down), my Georgetown Law colleague Mike Seidman - a cofounder and intellectual leader of the Critical Legal Studies movement in the 1980s - is brutally candid in his opinion of Judge Sotomayor's testimony today:

Speaking only for myself (I guess that's obvious), I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor's testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate—that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments. To claim otherwise—to claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results—is to claim that whenever Justices disagree among themselves, someone is either a fool or acting in bad faith. What does it say about our legal system that in order to get confirmed Judge Sotomayor must tell the lies that she told today? That judges and justices must live these lies throughout their professional carers?

Perhaps Justice Sotomayor should be excused because our official ideology about judging is so degraded that she would sacrifice a position on the Supreme Court if she told the truth. Legal academics who defend what she did today have no such excuse. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Also at Volokh Conspiracy, "Sotomayor (and Hatch & Feingold) on Fundamental Rights and the 14th Amendment," and "Sotomayor Again Misstates Fundamental Rights Doctrine."

And don't miss Byron York, "Republicans Don't Believe Sotomayor's Stories":

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are convinced that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has not been candid with them in under-oath testimony about her speeches and legal activism ...

Republican aides worked through the night, Tuesday into Wednesday, studying the 108-page transcript from Tuesday's hearing. They believe Sotomayor told a variety of stories, none of them entirely truthful, to explain her series of infamous "wise Latina" speeches. And they question her efforts to distance herself from the work of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, on whose board she served for twelve years in the 1980s and early 1990s.

See also my previous entry on Sotomayor's ties to PRLDEF and radical organizations, "Committee for Justice Advertisement: Sotomayor, Like Ayers, Supported Terrorists."

On today's hearings, see the New York Times, "Republican Senators Press Sotomayor on Abortion Views."

The big question: Will Sotomayor be confirmed? Well, "absent what Senator Lindsey Graham describes as “a complete meltdown” (a partial thaw wouldn’t do it), the only real questions that face Sonia Sotomayor concern the furniture and color of curtains she wants in her new office" (link).

More at Memeorandum.

Cartoon Credit: Americans for Limited Government.