Putting aside her very compelling personal story, what I find most important about her career -- and what I think would contribute most to the Supreme Court -- is her experience as a big-city prosecutor, a business lawyer and a trial judge. In those three jobs, she has dealt with a wide swath of humanity and the legal issues and problems in our judicial system. She has made decisions about whether to charge a person with a serious crime, helped crime victims get through the trauma of a trial, struggled with the appropriate sentence for convicted criminals and worked through complex business issues in private practice. It is those experiences that are missing on the court. I think those experiences are reflected in her work as an appellate judge. Her appellate decisions are very careful, thorough and show great attention to the facts of a case. She is a liberal, no question. But nothing I've read yet shows her to be a liberal lion, like William Brennan was.
Several of her decisions reflect a strong believer in the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment. She also is quite pragmatic: when an immigrant could not get into a courthouse for his deportation hearing because his lawyer was inside with the document he needed, the immigration judge refused to grant a new hearing because the immigrant erroneously framed his appeal as ineffective assistance of counsel. Sotomayor said the judge was correct that this was not the typical ineffective assistance claim, but she essentially told the judge to get real! It wasn't the immigrant's fault and he shouldn't be penalized in such a draconian way. I think it is that type of sensibility that President Obama was looking for.
If I had to compare to her anyone at this early stage, I think she could be in her approach to judging most like Sandra Day O'Connor, but to the left of O'Connor, a justice who first looks very closely at the facts of each case and then applies the law. It is hard and unwise to predict what kind of justice a nominee will be. We've had surprises in the past, so I'm not putting any money on this comparison yet!
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