Sotomayor Introduced Scalia in 2001

Jillian Bandes | June 04, 2009 6:21 PM

It was during a speech at Hofstra Law School on September 9, 2001. Sotomayor's critique of Scalia is veiled under references to other legal scholars, but it's quite clearly a critique:

Justice Scalia appears to delight in controversy, and his views have provoked a growing body of responses from not only legal but also academic and popular circles. Many–including some very prominent thinkers such as Ronald Dworkin – have questioned whether Justice Scalia’s theories of interpretation are the right ones, and have articulated alternatives. Others have wondered whether general theories of interpretation are even helpful when trying to get the law right. Still others have challenged Justice Scalia’s ways of understanding the role of a Constitution in our democracy, and the role that judges should play in preserving our nation’s values. Finally, a number of critics have argued that Justice Scalia’s particular views of how judges should interpret the law might themselves be a reflection of how well these norms further some of his own personal moral views.

Sotomayor also touched on legal ethics:

In one sense, legal ethics is different from ethics. Ethics is concerned with the norms of conduct that should govern people just insofar as they are people, whereas legal ethics—much like the ethics of many other professional fields—is concerned with the norms that should govern people insofar as they inhabit certain particularized roles, such as those of the lawyer or the judge. An understanding of these rules, and of the ways in which they might be improved, will thus require developing a secondary understanding of how these roles differ, and how they fit together into a larger social practice.