Judge Sotomayor graduated 2nd in her class at Princeton, was Summa Cum Laude and received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. How can the right say this is an Equal Opportunity hire?

Well, I am not taking a position on this with regard to the merits, but it is entirely possible to be an unqualified equal opportunity hire and be 2nd in Princeton as well as editor at Yale Law Journal. The reason is that grades at Princeton, depending on the courses taken, are frequently not blind--that is, the teacher knows that the student is a minority. As a result, those grades can be, and frequently are, inflated. As to law review, the requirements for law review were changed many years ago so that membership no longer requires high academic performance. Again, racial preferences, as was the case with Obama being elected to law review, can play a role. In sum, it is possible, and the argument should be centered on what she says and does, not what was done for her at Princeton and Yale.

Your question presupposes that a Justice of the Supreme Court is judged against the credentials of an average college graduate. The reality is that all potential Supreme Court nominees have stellar resumes. Thus, you should be comparing Sotomayor’s credentials against other potential nominees (not the average public). Your analysis should go something like this: … 1) Does Sotomayor have better credentials than all others? 2) If not, why was she nominated rather than the person with better credentials?

I think that would be because it was pretty common knowledge, even if not directly stated, that the President and his selection committee would automatically exclude white men from consideration. Oh, there may have been some interviews and a couple on the short list for "serious consideration", but that was never going to happen. It does seem to me, though, that some of her rulings have been inconsistent with this quote that I see attributed to her that "The Constitution means what it says", etc. We'll see.