Judgment and the Justice: An Ethnographic Reading of the Sotomayor Confirmation Hearings

Abstract

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was President Obama’s first nominee to the United States Supreme Court. She was confirmed by the Senate after three days of hearings in July, 2009 – and three months of partisan contention focused in part over her so-called “wise Latina” speech years earlier. My interest in the hearings is two-fold: first, in the question of how Sotomayor’s opponents tied the question of her particular judicial qualifications to her self-identity; and second, in the related question of how they worked minority identity more generally into a question of legitimacy. I focus on Republican opposition in the hearings, since Democrats – assured by their numerical majority in Congress at that time – engaged the nominee primarily in reaction to Republican challenges. My thesis is that the Republican performance was keyed to an oppositional discourse in which both the form and content of language were politicized in ideological terms – terms that ascribe a particular significance to race as a form of alienated solidarity.