I BET she's the very first one to admit publicly that she got into colelge ( Princeton ) based on affirmative action, IOW because she's a minority, even though by her own public statement her grades were inferior.

GREAT choice for SCOTUS !!!!

not ....

I guess this is what we've come to in society today - choices even now for SCOUTUS ( and the White House ) made on the basis not of qualifications or track record, but ethnicity.

Well, Justice Ginsburg admitted in the interview that she too was a product of affirmative action:


Q: What do you think about Judge Sotomayor’s frank remarks that she is
a product of affirmative action?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: So am I. I was the first tenured woman at Columbia.
That was 1972, every law school was looking for its woman. Why?
Because Stan Pottinger, who was then head of the office for civil
rights of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, was
enforcing the Nixon government contract program. Every university had
a contract, and Stan Pottinger would go around and ask, How are you
doing on your affirmative-action plan? William McGill, who was then
the president of Columbia, was asked by a reporter: How is Columbia
doing with its affirmative action? He said, It’s no mistake that the
two most recent appointments to the law school are a woman and an
African-American man.

Q: And was that you?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: I was the woman. I never would have gotten that
invitation from Columbia without the push from the Nixon
administration. I understand that there is a thought that people will
point to the affirmative-action baby and say she couldn’t have made it
if she were judged solely on the merits. But when I got to Columbia I
was well regarded by my colleagues even though they certainly
disagreed with many of the positions that I was taking. They backed me
up: If that’s what I thought, I should be able to speak my mind.

Asking "How is Columbia doing with its affirmative action?" is like asking the LA Lakers 'How are you doing finding tall people that would like a multi-year contract that pays millions of dollars a year, and that play basketball ?' :-)

The bottom line, though, is plain and clear - 'affirmative action' = 'government mandated racism ( and sexism, in the Ginsberg example )'. It is no different than the Jim Crow law of a generation ago, only the colors have been reversed. If one was wrong, then the other is wrong also.

An intellectual exercise - try to imagine the reaction to these, if they existed, and how long it would take for the lawsuit to be filed against them ?

A TV channel called 'WET' ( White Entertainment Television )

A Congressional Caucus called 'The White Caucus'. One where, as is the case today in the Black Caucus, your skin color is an entry requirement ( recently a WHITE Representative from a majority BLACK district tried to join the BCC, and was rebuffed BECAUSE of his skin color. )

After I posted this, I remembered that Justice Thomas's first language is Gullah, an Afro-English creole dialect. And a commenter points out that Felix Frankfurter's family didn't arrive in the U.S. from Vienna until Frankfurter was twelve years old.

Interesting -- what wasn't interesting until Spanish was the "other" language.

I BET she's the very first one to admit publicly that she got into colelge ( Princeton ) based on affirmative action, IOW because she's a minority, even though by her own public statement her grades were inferior.

I'm not sure about Holy Cross, but doesn't Thomas freely admit that he got into Yale because of affirmative action?

My broad hint wasn't taken, so let me make it more explicit: I have no desire to moderate an affirmative action debate here, and further posts on that issue will be deleted, and if necessary I will close comments.

If Sotomayor grew up in the Bronx, with Spanish as her first language, then that would actually make English her third language.

I have a friend, an actor/acting teacher of some acclaim, who also grew up in the Bronx. He said that he had to take speaking lessons for years because most people who had English as a first language could not understand what he was saying when he was speaking Bronx.

I grew up in Brooklyn myself, and I can attest to the fact that Brooklynese is also a separate language from English.

I am fortunate in that I learned English at home, French in high school, Spanish in college, and German (and some Russian) in my first post college job.

I had a meeting with some Swiss engineers. They were discussing some aspects of the project in Swiss German. They were astounded when i corrected them in my (slightly Bavarian accented) German. Then switched to (Canadian accented) French.

Yiddish, I don't do so well.

Several of the early USSC justices were born in ireland or Scotland. In 18th Century ireland and Scotland, the respective versions of Gaelic co-existed with English as the spoken language, usually determined by economic class. I suppose it's possible that one (or more) of these justices could have grown up in a household where Gaelic was spoken, at least as a second language to the servants if such existed.

I don't remember off hand which justices were immigrants from Ireland or Scotland, but I think there were perhaps 2 or 3.

I've always thought it remarkable that Ayn Rand managed to become one of the most influential authors of the 20th century despite not coming to the U.S. from the USSR until age 26. I don't know how much English she knew on arrival, but I don't think it was much.

Actually, given the accepted level of public schooling in the Bronx, I would have suspected that growing up in a Spanish-speaking family in the Bronx would simply mean that you were a functional illiterate in 2 languages, instead of just one.

That was certainly true of a good friend from the South Bronx, who admittedly spoke barely understandable English with a heavy Spanish accent, and barely understandable Spanish with an even worse English/Bronx accent and couldn't read or write in either, until he enlisted in the military and started his education with a GED. He now has a graduate degree and is working on a second.

I don't think he considers the language thing a big deal, since he grew up speaking both. He would be more proud of escaping from the poverty and crime that claimed most of his contemporaries.

Reading Ginsburg's comment in the context of her complete answer, it really doesn't make much sense. She tosses it in as an aside, while discussing how she and Sotomayor are unalike, and thus, Sotomayor would be a valuable addition, presumably because people could see a different sort of female on the bench. Or something. But Ginsburg definitely sees the English-as-a-second-language as a positive. Why that would be so, she offers no clue. Maybe to her, it's self-evident.

Which begs the original question, was Ginsburg correct? it would seem...no.

DavidBernstein: The topic is "English not first language." Ayn Rand (or Joseph Conrad) not mastering English until their late 20s is tangential, but not off topic.

Alex Kozinski, "tangential" since Bush went with Roberts and Alito rather than him, but not off topic since he didn't start learning English until adolescence? Tangential and/or off topic to speculate whether Kozinski was disadvantaged by ethnic politics, there being already two Jewish Justices, though it seems not to have mattered that there are already five Catholic Justices on the Court?

(I was going to mention Tom Stoppard as someone who most impressively overcame being a non-native speaker of English, but see that he learned English at a much younger age than I had realized.)

One can let this "first justice not to have English as (their) native language" go as a bit of historical trivia, but I think it more interesting, and far more consequential, to ask if it matters whether the person is a native speaker of English or acquired English not as their first language. Thoughts? Is it the cultural sensitivity or empathy thing?

Personally, I like it as a story that someone has achieved more from lesser beginnings, but not sure that is of much bearing on their qualifications. Ceteris paribus, I do think it better for the country that there be diversity on the Court.

Davebo:

I've always thought it remarkable that Ayn Rand managed to become one of the most influential authors of the 20th century

Seriously? Are you rating Rand in the top 1,000? And if so, by what parameters?

From Wikipedia, hardly a right-wing or libertarian source:

According to a 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, Atlas Shrugged was second to the Bible as the book that made most difference in American readers' lives.[50] Modern Library's 1998 three-month online poll of the 100 best novels of the 20th century[51][52] found Atlas rated #1 although it was not included on the list chosen by the Modern Library panel of authors and scholars.

Rand's impact on contemporary libertarian thought has been considerable...

The Fountainhead eventually became a worldwide success...As of April 2003, it had sold over six million copies, and continued to sell about 100,000 copies per year.

Rand's books continue to be widely sold and read, with 25 million copies sold (as of 2007), and 800,000 more being sold each year...

Davebo-

Influential, not necessarily good. Given the sheer number of Americans whose views have been influenced at least in part by or in opposition to Rand's work, and the political effect of her moral, non-religious defense of capitalism, I'd say it's inarguable that she's one of the most influential English language writers of the 20th century. Definitely in the top 1000, probably the top 100-200 (and if we limit ourselves to fiction writers/novelists, definitely the top 100).

David, I suspect you are being deliberately obtuse.

In the modern liberal mindset, "Germans" are "white", therefore in the "oppressor" class, and thus it is unexceptional to grow up in a German-speaking household. Hispanics are officially in the "oppressed" class, and therefore qualify as exceptional.

This is the same mindset that led one NBC commentator to bemoan the lack of "diversity" in the 1994 Olympic Winter Games at Lillehammer, Norway. This, despite the presence of over 1700 athletes from 67 countries. But you see, they were all white, at least in the eyes of NBC, so the idea that Norwegians and Swiss might be different enough to be competitive did not enter into their calculation. In the same way, Justice Ginsburg likely thinks of Brandeis and Frankfurter as simply white male Americans and worthy of no special "credit" for diversity. Facts, such as you tender, are worthy of elision when diversity is at stake.

Ed Darnell:

<i>Hiring the best, promoting the best, we tended to stay well away from running afoul of EEOC rules. Odd about that.</i>

I don't disbelieve you, but I wonder if you could clarify who you worked for, and whether they tended to get 'pick of the litter'? There is a scenario in which larger, more wealthy firms can afford to higher "the best", while unwittingly thinning out the ranks of qualified minority and women candidates. In this hypothetical, smaller, less resourceful firms can only fill their 'quotas' by sacrificing quality for gender or skin color. I'm not stipulating that's the case, I'm only pointing out that your anecdotal experience does not provide evidence for or against this hypothesis.

One of the moral hazards of affirmative action is that it leaves us all wondering whether someone like Barack Obama or Sonia Sotomayor could have succeeded on their own merits. In Obama's case, he has refused to release his college transcripts, deepening the speculation that he was in fact an Ivy underachiever. His poor grasp of history and economics further undermines the case for affirmative action.

BBB

Bill Poser

I don't suppose that a conference has ever been conducted in a language other than English, or that a lawyer has argued before the Supreme Court in a language other than English? (No jokes about lawyer-talk not being English please...)

Bill, if you accept that American Sign Language is a separate language from English (it is an issue of some debate, so I acknowledge that it's far from a settled question), then there certainly have been conferences partly in non-English. I tried to do some research on whether or not a deaf attorney (using ASL) has argued in front of SCOTUS, but could not find anything yea or nay. Maybe EV or one of the other former clerks that blogs/posts here knows the answer.

Two separate points:

1) Sotomayor was valedictorian of her HS class -- now, perhaps she was not as well educated as someone who was first at Bronx Science, but clearly she wasn't a laggard in HS, either;
2) Speaking of great authors who didn't write in their first language, don't forget Nabokov.

Strike my last comment -- I confused him with Cardozo.

Well, I've posted before on numerous cases involving English as the official language, which would likely be the cases in which these feelings might be revealed. And I've posted on McNeil vs. Aquilos, a series of cases Sonia Sotomayor decided on the District Court bench involving an English-speaking African-American nurse who alleged discrimination by her Tagalog-speaking colleagues (and in which Sotomayor said her many years on the Board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund didn't matter because she left the Board when she went on the bench). See, e.g., 1995 WL 406086, S.D.N.Y.,1995. ("I also reject McNeil's claim that my past affiliation with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund (hereinafter the “Fund”) creates a ground for disqualification. I resigned from the Board of Directors of the Fund before I took the bench in October 1992. The Ninth Circuit case McNeil relies upon was argued November 3, 1992 and decided July 16, 1993. That an officer of an organization with which I was previously affiliated made a statement, two years after I resigned from the Board of Directors, criticizing a decision rendered by the Ninth Circuit after I became a judge in no way suggests a reasonable ground for my recusal from this matter"), id., at *2. I also pointed out in an earlier post that Sotomayor's position was disingenuous at best, since while she was on the PRLDEF Board, the organization went to the Supreme Court on this and similar issues, so her statement that she was off the Board when the actual decision was handed down and the organization's management was doing things she didn't agree with, rings hollow.

But more on topic, I will point out that one case which might be thought of as being more specific to the "native language" vs. "native English" debate is the 9th Circuit's en banc decision in Yniguez v. Arizonans for Official English, 69 F.3d 920 (9th Cir. 1995), reversed and vacated, sub nom, Arizonans for Official English v. Arizona, 520 U.S. 43 (1997). In the en banc portion, the majority position one might characterize as "pro-native language" was written by monolingual Judge Reinhardt, and the "pro-English" position by MALDEF Man of the Year Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez, with further dissent by Judge Kozinski. That was the case in which Reinhardt went at Kozinski very personally in a "special concurrence" with his own majority opinion. (Disclosure: I was counsel throughout these cases.)

So you can't tell language-related views based on family history or surname. Ideology often offers a slightly better guide, but not much.

As to some pretty interesting stuff on Sotomayor's race views more generally than language, see yesterday's Washington Times lead opinion:
Sotomayor Plays the Race Card.

Sotomayor went to Catholic high school (Cardinal Spellman), so the comments about public schools in the Bronx aren't really applicable.

As for ASL, it's definitely a separate language. However, I don't think there are very many deaf-from-birth lawyers who use ASL in court. There are more late-deafened people working as lawyers, and the technology of choice seems to be computer-assisted realtime transcription (CART). I believe it works the same way as court reporting with a stenotype machine and may be done simultaneously. Anyone out there have any experience with this?

(It's a little off topic, but interesting.)

DB: can you email back my post on affirmative action that you deleted? The one that stated that having only students from prep schools attending Ivy League is not a from of meritocracy? I find it odd that you would delete posts that go against the grain of your beliefs, but that speaks more about you than anything else.

If Frankfurter came from Vienna, why wasn't he a Wiener?

I guess he was, though, a Wiener named Frankfurter.

As far as the meat product, here in the U.S. we tend to use Wiener and Frankfurter interchangeably, but they are really not the same thing at all.

. . . or comments regarding the oddity of Ginsburg not realizing, as I did with a few moments reflection, that other Justices were not native English speakers, including one of her current colleagues.

We don't know that she didn't think about it ten minutes later, all we have is the reporter's account of the first statement.

As part of the Dallas Heart Study, I took a memory test yesterday. One of the questions was to list as many words beginning with a certain letter as I could in one minute, orally. I was surprised by the question and then by the selection of the letter.

With the pressure off two minutes later I thought of three times as many words. With two more minutes' reflection I thought of a strategy to exhaust my deeper memory of the words -- which probably would have quadrupled my output on the exercise.

Ginsburg is right, I think, in assuming that familiarity with another language might lead to different thought, perhaps quicker thought on some occasions, and she's most likely correct in thinking that one's speaking another language than English as a native may lead to other insights. I'll forgive her the momentary history lapse, because she got the deeper issues right.

At this point in U.S. history, it's astounding that we haven't had much greater diversity in first languages on the Court, and that we as a nation have so little ability to converse in other tongues. The last native speaker of the Delaware/Lenni Lenape language died in Oklahoma within the past decade. We're losing languages more quickly in this nation than we are gaining fluency in any of them. That's too bad. Cherokee and Navajo tongues saved our bacon in two world wars. You'd think we'd want to hang on to that kind of heritage, perhaps by celebrating those who can converse in more than one tongue.

"Interesting -- what wasn't interesting until Spanish was the "other" language."

I thought the point was that she started out speaking Bronx.

[Amusing local event: local political cartoonist -- whose skills are exceeded by cartoonists for most high school papers -- just had a cartoon where a character is giving advice on how to drive. One of the word balloons is "Don't be a _____," the last word being in Spanish. I guess the cartoonist isn't up on Spanish profanity, and apparently thought the word was the equivalent of "jackass." It's actually EXTREMELY insulting and obscene, to the point where profanity-limited germanic tongues have no equivalent.]

DB: can you email back my post on affirmative action that you deleted? The one that stated that having only students from prep schools attending Ivy League is not a from of meritocracy? I find it odd that you would delete posts that go against the grain of your beliefs, but that speaks more about you than anything else.

I deleted it AFTER I posted asking everyone to stop debating affirmative action on this thread, and you posted anyway. And I deleted several posts for that reason, and these had a range of views on the subject. And I'm afraid it's gone for good.

DB: can you email back my post on affirmative action that you deleted? The one that stated that having only students from prep schools attending Ivy League is not a from of meritocracy? I find it odd that you would delete posts that go against the grain of your beliefs, but that speaks more about you than anything else.

Is this a post on how not to ask for a favor?

New P: "Unfortunately, however, most of the insights have been trivial. The rest have been of little importance."

When I studied French, I learned from my french teachers that the french pride themselves on the precision that the french language allows, and sometimes even demands. Because

The difference between "trivial" and "of little importance" may or may not be trivial, but you imply a distinction that then you fail to use. Or, one could assume that your meaning of trivial is less than of little importance, but it is unclear in any case.

Perhaps, New P, the insight that language can be used with precision is an insight that escaped you, and is one that, if you should find it, you may find of great import. Or perhaps you just never learned french.

Supreme Court Rule 31. Translations
Whenever any record to be transmitted to this Court containsmaterial written in a foreign language without a translationmade under the authority of the lower court, or admitted to be correct, the clerk of the court transmitting therecord shall advise the Clerk of this Court immediately sothat this Court may order that a translation be supplied and,if necessary, printed as part of the joint appendix.

Maybe they've received foreign language briefs in the past?