Advocacy Toolkit
Below are a few helpful resources provided by Hispanics for a Fair Judiciary:
Dear Senator:
As you are one of our nation’s leaders in the U.S. Senate, I write to urge you to support the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and ensure that she be treated with the fairness and respect due any Supreme Court nominee.
WHEREAS, President Barack Obama has nominated federal Court of Appeals Judge for the Second Circuit Sonia Sotomayor as the next Associate Justice to the Supreme Court.
Dear Senator:
On behalf of the undersigned elected officials, we write to express our support for the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
There are few decisions that a president makes that have such an obvious long term impact as the selection of a new Justice to serve on the Supreme Court. Presidents come and go in a few years, but federal judges hold their jobs for life, and the decisions they make will affect all of us in ways too numerous to count.
President Obama has maintained that to uphold constitutional values, a justice must have:
1. Not only intellectual ability to apply the law to the facts of a case
2. But must also possess a common sense understanding of how laws affect the reality of people’s lives.
QUESTION: Judge Sotomayor has written: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Does Judge Sotomayor think that a Hispanic woman would make a better judge than a white male?
At the time of Judge Sotomayor‟s nomination to the Second Circuit, Gerald Walpin, who the New York Times called “a former federal prosecutor who is widely known in New York legal circles as a staunch conservative,” described Judge Sotomayor as “exactly what conservatives want: a nonactivist judge who does not apply her own views but is bound by the law.”