President Obama?? has selected federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor to serve on the Supreme Court. Education Week's School Law blog has a nice quick summary of her background. My first reaction is, "wow, another Catholic." She would make six, and she attended Catholic schools, too. The legislative and executive branches have found themselves utterly incapable of staunching the bleeding from Catholic school closures in the inner-city. Maybe she'll turn her judicial activism to solving this problem from the bench.
P.S. Bona fide school law expert Joshua Dunn, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, co-author of Education Next's Legal Beat column, and co-editor of the forthcoming Fordham/Brookings Institution Press volume Schoolhouse to Courthouse, has this to say about the appointment:
Since she won't change the ideological balance of the Court, her most likely influence on controversial education decisions will be on how she influences Justice Kennedy. ??There is some speculation that Justice Kennedy has sided with the liberal bloc in many cases because Justice Breyer has carefully and amiably wooed him. ??Such pursuits on the Court do seem to be driven by personalities as much as legal reasoning. ??If Justice Sotomeyer's personality is as disagreeable as Jeffrey Rosen has reported it could alienate Justice Kennedy.I think it would be a mistake to believe that her background will play a significant role in deciding divisive educational issues such as vouchers.
