Barack Obama has picked a winner in many ways. The selection and nomination of Sonia Sotomayor will get some opposition from the Republicans, but if they are smart they’ll hold their bickering and sniping and go with what is a good choice in so many ways though her nomination will further damage the Republican image going forward.Â
In Sotomayor, Obama has a female and a Latino. Bongo!
From a purely law perspective Sonia is looked upon by the American Bar Association as a centrist: another plus for Obama. Sonia is young, bright, and she has amassed some good credentials along the way.
Sonia Sotomayor graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. She earned her A.B. from Princeton University, summa cum laude, in 1976, where she won the Pyne Prize, the highest general award given to Princeton undergraduates. Sotomayor obtained her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. Sotomayor then served as an Assistant District Attorney under prominent New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, prosecuting robberies, assaults, murders, police brutality, and child pornography cases. In 1984, she entered private practice, making partner at the commercial litigation firm of Pavia & Harcourt, where she specialized in intellectual property litigation.
Personally, having been married and divorced, she has the time to dedicate herself to her career.
Sotomayor was nominated on November 27, 1991, by President George H. W. Bush to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by John M. Walker, Jr. She became the youngest judge in the Southern District and the first Hispanic federal judge anywhere in New York State. Sotomayor was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 11, 1992, and received her commission the next day.
She isn’t shy when it comes to taking on major cases with serious consequences either. On March 30, 1995, she issued the preliminary injunction against Major League Baseball, preventing MLB from unilaterally implementing a new Collective Bargaining Agreement and using replacement players, thus ending the 1994 baseball strike. In another high-profile case, she issued an order allowing the Wall Street Journal to publish Vince Foster’s suicide note.
From my perspective, Obama got this one right!
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As a spiritual-futurist, I have a BA degree majoring in history. One cannot know the future without knowing the past which holds clues to what is on the horizon. The world is in such a rapid expansion of knowledge that we are close to entering a tipping point that will forever change earth as we know it.
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