Sonia Sotomayor and Affirmative Action

Damon W. Root | June 11, 2009

In addition to the mountain of documents Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has provided the Senate Judiciary Committee in preparation for her July 13 confirmation hearings, there are also a number of videos featuring her speeches and assorted public appearances. The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports that these videos shed new light on Sotomayor's views on affirmative action and racial preferences:

The clips include lengthy remarks about her experiences as an "affirmative action baby" whose lower test scores were overlooked by admissions committees at Princeton University and Yale Law School because, she said, she is Hispanic and had grown up in poor circumstances.

"If we had gone through the traditional numbers route of those institutions, it would have been highly questionable if I would have been accepted," she said on a panel of three female judges from New York who were discussing women in the judiciary. The video is dated "early 1990s" in Senate records....

"With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates," she said. "And that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that. There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects."

More here.