White House tries to prove Sotomayor’s smarts

White House officials have assembled a squad of distinguished legal experts to rebut charges that Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s Supreme Court pick, is an intellectual lightweight who puts her political views ahead of the law.

White House advisers and allies have scrambled to repair the damage to Sotomayor’s reputation inflicted by an article published early this month in The New Republic, a left-leaning magazine, which painted Sotomayor as “not that smart.”

{mosads}Several prominent legal scholars, including law school classmates of Sotomayor, assembled by White House officials Wednesday afternoon sought to dispel that characterization during a conference call with reporters.

Martha Minow, a professor at Harvard Law School and onetime classmate of Sotomayor, said that she teaches Sotomayor’s opinions at Harvard and that her body of work “shows a great deal of craft.” Minow also called Sotomayor a judge who takes a “careful adjudicatory approach.”

Minow also noted that Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and was a distinguished graduate of Yale Law School. Minow called her body of opinions “about as professional a presentation of craft you can find.”

Minow said Sotomayor “reads statutes extremely closely” and that the Supreme Court once reversed a decision because she had adopted an overly literal interpretation of a word in the law.

Some critics panned Sotomayor as an intellectual lightweight soon after Obama announced his intent to nominate her to replace retiring Justice David Souter. The notion that Sotomayor would have trouble standing up to justices such as Antonin Scalia has gained momentum since Jeffrey Rosen penned in an article in The New Republic in which he reported that former law clerks from the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and federal prosecutors give her less than rave reviews.

“The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was ‘not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,’ as one former 2nd Circuit clerk for another judge put it,” Rosen wrote.

The legal scholars and lawyers on Wednesday’s White House-organized call sought to rebut that characterization.

“She was very engaged and very polite to all the parties involved,” said Kevin Russell, a partner at Howe and Russell, who argued a case before Sotomayor. “I saw no indication of anything but perfectly acceptable judicial temperament.”

The expert also sought to play down the charge by conservative activists that Sotomayor is a liberal activist judge.

{mosads}Wendy Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation network, a conservative-leaning group, called Sotomayor on Tuesday “a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important [than] the law as written,” a charge that appeared in the lead story of the following day’s New York Times.  

But Paul Smith, a partner at Jenner & Block, called Sotomayor “a lawyer’s lawyer who cares about craft.” He is also a former classmate of the nominee.  

“She doesn’t come into cases with a broad doctrinal bias,” he added. “She looks at the details of the facts.”

William Marshall, a professor at the University of North Carolina law school, described her as having the temperament of a cautious corporate lawyer on business cases.

“She’s a cautious lawyer and one who cares about judicial craft,” he said. “Her business decisions suggest someone who is a corporate lawyer herself.”

“She holds people to the terms of their contract,” he said. “She promotes predictability. She reads statutes narrowly.”

Sotomayor worked as a litigator specializing in intellectual property cases at Pavia & Harcourt before she was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.