Sotomayor to Obama: You Made a Bad Pick

That's right, Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, says she disagrees with Obama's view on the importance of empathy in judicial decisions.

Obama, as part of the left's desire to overturn centuries-old legals traditions, believes judges shouldn't just weigh the law when deciding a case. Instead, a judge should also feel empathy for the parties to a case.

Of course, what that means is difficult to know. In a case involving a murder, is the defendant on trial for the crime deserving of empathy (say for a difficult childhood or living in poverty), or the victim?

Or are the fireman in the New Haven case deserving of empathy because they studied hard and passed the test for promotion in New Haven but were denied promotion because too many of them were white, or instead do the minority candidates who failed the test warrant our empathy?

As you can quickly see, empathy is just another excuse for a judge to smuggle their preferences into judicial decision-making.

So Judge Sotomayor tells the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearings that Obama is wrong about the importance of empathy to the work of judges.

If one didn't know better, she sounds more conservative than Republican nominees to the court!

Disparate Impact

Recent news reports suggest that 80% of the layoffs in the current recession have been men.

From labor force participation rates, it seems men are about 55% of the employed, so this is an enormous "disparate impact".

For those who think simple statistical disparities are good indicators of discrimination, disparate impact has been one of the standards by which some claim discrimination has occurred.

But does anyone think men are being "targeted" with layoffs because they are men, across the entire economy? Of course not.

Instead, job losses have tended to occur in fields which have a high proportion of its jobs filled by men (such as construction or finance), while job losses have been low in fields where a high proportion of jobs are filled by women (such as nursing or education).

This is a good lesson of why using disparate impact as a standard of discrimination is often wrong.