Wonder How That Anecdote Got In There?
Today’s Times has a good, if not slightly fluffy, piece discussing Sotomayor’s life between law school and her Supreme Court appointment. There are a lot of great, cute anecdotes and details, but here’s one that struck me:
Often, friends say this image lingers in their mind’s eye: Ms. Sotomayor poring over law books and legal papers. Some days, she has said, it is hard enough to find time to sleep. A law clerk who submitted a draft memo could expect to watch the judge draw lines through passive language and circle split infinitives. If she revisited a case at 10 p.m., her clerks worked, too.
It’s unclear who the source of this little factoid is — it could be Sotomayor, a friend or a former clerk — but it’s pretty clear why someone proferred it up.
From Mother Jones‘ Stephanie Mencimer:
To put it bluntly, Sotomayor doesn’t write very well. Reporters have sort of danced around this problem. The New York Times‘ Adam Liptak charitably described her opinions as models of judicial craftsmanship that are “not always a pleasure to read.”
Liptak’s analysis is something of an understatement. Sotomayor’s opinions read like she’s still following a formula she learned in college and show little of the smart narratives employed by the federal judiciary’s brightest lights.
Or, slightly more harshly, Heather MacDonald (talking about the “Wise Latina” speech:
The speech, which usefully reveals her own voice without the assistance of a law clerk, is filled with weird, unidiomatic constructions and errors of punctuation and grammar. If she is elevated to the Supreme Court, her opinions will continue to benefit from the interventions of law clerks and will presumably not demonstrate the patent strangeness of her unedited prose. Still, I find it disturbing that someone with a merely intermittent grasp of usage will be responsible for the country’s most important legal opinions.
Also, it turns out that the modern prescription against the split infinitive is basically garbage.
