Sonia Sotomayor has a lovely smile, and like many Americans she has paid a price for it. According to the questionnaire she completed as part of the Senate confirmation process, she owes approximately $15,000 to her dentist.

Several writers have been boggled by the size of the bill. In fact, it's pretty easy to spend $15,000 on dental treatment. Dental plans generally cover between 50 percent to 80 percent of restorative treatments (crowns, etc.), and most plans have an annual reimbursement cap of around $1,500-$2,000. If you need something more than a cleaning or a filling, you're going to be digging into your own pocket, whatever kind of coverage you have. Just yesterday I was told that treating one problem tooth would cost me around $5,000.

If there's anything surprising here, it's that the dentist allowed Sotomayor to run a tab that big. Most practices would require cash—or credit card—on the nail. Sotomayor is obviously a trusted customer, but after all, if you can't trust a judge (especially one on most people's SCOTUS shortlist), who can you trust?

(I've been working on a series of pieces about American dentistry. Check out Slate in six weeks or so for more on this topic.)

Photograph of Sonia Sotomayor by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Tags: denistry, dentist bill, finances, health-care costs, Sonia Sotomayor

Now that the insulting question of whether Sonia Sotomayor is just another Harriet Miers has subsided, a new one arises: Does Barack Obama's nominee have more in common with conservative justice Sam Alito? Liberals opposed Alito far more strenuously than they did current Chief Justice and George W. Bush nominee John Roberts. An Italian from working-class roots who also attended Princeton, Alito wields the same, "up from the bootstraps" personal history as Sotomayor. And—much like the Obama administration's emphasis on its nominee's "wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life's journey"—the Bush White House stressed Alito's disadvantaged background heavily during the "rollout" of his nomination.

So was Alito helped by the same "identity politics" that critics of Sotomayor now decry? Did Roberts merely benefit from being a classically white-bread American male? And what exactly is this "life experience" hoo-haw that everyone keeps mentioning when discussing U.S. law?

Reihan Salam, a prolific journalist and critic discussed this and more with me on a recent Bloggingheads. Watch:

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Samuel Alito; Supreme Court; judges; diversity; bloggingheads

You're right, Hanna. The White House, and Sotomayor, too, by agreeing to the walk back, are giving the "wise Latina" mini-fracas more air, not less. Her speech sparked an interesting and even vital discussion this week about the value of having judges with different life experiences on the bench. Now we move to hedging and hemming and hawing? I'll ask the next question they'd all be better off not spending the weekend fielding: OK, so if her word choice was poor, does she still believe in the idea she was expressing?

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges; diversity, Supreme Court

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said today that the president would say that Sotomayor's word choice in her suddenly-infamous Berkeley speech was "poor." It's maddening that the White House is now taking this line. Maybe they mean to take the air out of it, but I bet it will accomplish the opposite, and give everyone license to talk about it again all weekend. This was a published speech, after all, not an off-the-cuff remark, and presumably the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal allows authors to edit copy, like everyone else.

It wasn't the best choice of words, but I would downgrade that to "poor" only because it is likely to be taken out of context when, eight years later, she is nominated for the Supreme Court. As we have hashed out here and here, Sotomayor was talking about sex discrimination cases, in which there is actual evidence that having a woman on a panel of judges actually does make a difference. Her speech was actually much more nuanced than the right made it out to be, which Gibbs got to in the second half of his speech:

She was simply making the point that experiences are relevant to the process of judging. Your personal experiences have a tendency to make you more aware of certain facts and certain cases, that your experiences impact your understanding.

But I'm betting all we're going to hear from that speech is that word "poor."

Tags: robert gobbs backtrack, white house on sonia sotomayor

Anyone notice that the New York Times story by Jo Becker and Adam Liptak about Sotomayor raising "questions about her judicial temperament and willingness to listen" was subject to a headline makeover this morning? The headline this morning? "Sotomayor's Sharp Tongue Raises Issue of Temperament." The headline now? "Sotomayor's Blunt Style Raises Issue of Temperament." Dana Goldstein at Tapped caught the original headline it for what it was. Jess pointed out a while back that the Times swapped its obit from "Bea Arthur, TV Battle-ax, Dies at 86" to "Bea Arthur, Star of Two TV Comedies, Dies at 86." Any bets on what the headline writers there are teeing up for the confirmation itself? "Harridan's Harrowing Ride?" "Shrill Shrew Shatters Senate?" "Vetting the Virago?" Good times.

Tags: sonia sotomayor; gender; New York Times

I’ve been reading a lot of headlines to the effect that “Identity politics are condescending,” and I’ve come to the conclusion that I have no idea what identity politics are. To me, the phrase has always referred to the dated assumption that the interests of any particular subgroup are best represented by other members of that subgroup. So the expectation is that Sotomayor will represent “Latina interests” or somesuch, an idea she explicitly rejects when she says “No one person, judge or nominee will speak in a female or people of color voice.” But in today’s Seattle Times I am informed that identity politics involve “political payback for an ethnic group or gender.” And elsewhere it just seems to mean diversity for the sake of diversity, or perhaps for the sake of bleeding heart liberalism.

I don’t generally see members of minority groups as vehicles for the interests of some specific class. The reason I care about diversity is that I care about the “expansion of identity creation,” a phrase I think I stole from Reason’s Nick Gillespie. It’s not symbolism I care about; it’s the material way perceptions change when the word “judge” does not automatically call to mind a wrinkled white male, the way unconscious bias fades, stereotype threat loses its grip, and alternative lives become easier to contemplate. It's the obliteration of subtle, silent constraints on behavior, something any libertarian ought to care about.

Of course, when I make this argument publicly, I am accused of playing identity politics. So it’d be super helpful if people would spell out what they mean and what it is they are opposing.

A guest post from Cornell law professor Eduardo M. Peñalver, who clerked on the Second Circuit for Judge Guido Calabresi and on the Supreme Court for Justice John Paul Stevens:

As some of you have pointed out, considered in the context the rest of her speech, it is clear that Sotomayor merely meant that appointing “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences” to the bench would (on average) do more to improve judicial decision-making than appointing a(nother) comparably wise white male judge. Understood in this way, the comment is benign and, more importantly, almost certainly true.

Crucial to understanding Judge Sotomayor’s argument is the way in which decisions are made in appellate courts. Both the court on which she sits and the court to which she aspires decide cases collectively. This context is crucial because a large body of social science evidence confirms Judge Sotomayor’s contention that ensuring that a group includes people with a variety of viewpoints and life experiences increases the reliability of the group’s decision-making process. Diverse groups are more likely to reach the right conclusion because the different members of the group complement each other’s blind-spots and reduce the likelihood that commonly held, but incorrect, assumptions will carry the day.

In contrast, homogenous groups tend to feed on their own shortcomings because it is more often the case that no one in the group will challenge widely held biases and misperceptions. In one influential study by Samuel Sommers, a Tufts University psychologist, mixed-race mock juries were found to be more likely to discuss a broader range of case facts than their all-white counterparts. In contrast, members of all-white juries were found to be more likely to make erroneous statements, and those erroneous statements were more likely to go uncorrected. As the conservative legal scholar Adrian Vermeule put it in a 2007 article in the Stanford Law Review, “diversity dilutes groupthink and can thus improve both group deliberation and group decisionmaking.”

The cognitive benefits of diversity for collective decision-making point toward the other piece of information necessary to understand Judge Sotomayor’s argument: the demographic make-up of the federal judiciary. The federal bench as a whole is both significantly whiter (81 percent) and more male (75 percent) than the population in general (75 percent and 49 percent, respectively), and this is especially true of the Court of Appeals. Latinos are particularly underrepresented, constituting just 7 percent of all federal judges but over 12 percent of the population of the United States. Do Judge Sotomayor’s conservative critics really want to contend that a greater diversity of life experiences and viewpoints on the federal bench will not make a difference for the better?

Judge Sotomayor could obviously have been a little more precise in choosing her words. Considered in its full context, however, her point was clear enough. Not only was her comment not racist, it should be utterly uncontroversial.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges; diversity

Jason Linkins has a great piece up at Huffington Post quoting Justice Samuel Alito on the virtues of judicial empathy. (“When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.") And also quoting Antonin Scalia on the power of courts to “make law.” To which I add a brief P.S., also from Scalia, concurring in James B. Beam Distilling Co. v. Georgia:

I am not so naive (nor do I think our forebears were) as to be unaware that judges in a real sense "make" law. But they make it as judges make it, which is to say as though they were "finding" it—discerning what the law is, rather than decreeing what it is today changed to, or what it will tomorrow be.

How come when Scalia says it, he’s calling 'em as he sees 'em? But when Sotomayor says it, she’s a free-range liberal activist? Note to Sotomayor: The trick is to never apologize.

Tags: sonia sotomayor; supreme court; scalia; activism

A guest post from Yale law professor Heather Gerken:

Over the last day, I’ve been fielding calls from reporters, members of your tribe, many of whom have asked some variation on the following questions: “What role does identity politics play on the Supreme Court, and should those who support civil-rights causes be happy about Judge Sotomayor’s nomination?” (This, for what it’s worth, is almost a direct quote).

There is only one sensible answer to such questions. Please stop. Honestly. It’s embarrassing even to have to say this, but let me spell it out.

These aren’t just the wrong questions; they are silly questions. They begin with the premise, already evident in commentary, that someone who is a woman (or a Latino or from a working-class background) somehow has an “identity,” whereas the other recent nominees to the court mysteriously do not. If you think Judge Sotomayor’s nomination raises questions of “identity politics,” then you should ask yourself what exactly you think is so neutral about the politics of prior nominees.

You might insist that President Obama—and Judge Sotomayor herself—have put her identity at issue, so it’s fair game. But that leads me to the second reason to resist the question. It is one thing to say that all of the justices bring their own histories and experiences to the courtroom. It’s quite another to insist that one’s background gets witlessly translated into votes on specific issues. Surely that’s not a hard distinction to figure out. After all, the whole point of judging is to leverage what one knows about the world and to compensate for what one doesn’t know. It’s exceedingly hard to do it, and judges don’t always succeed. But if we think there’s no possibility that judges will at least try to step out of the bounds of their experiences, it’s not entirely clear why we have courts in the first place. It must be possible to say that Judge Sotomayor—who presumably has had some experience with discrimination, some sense of the dilemmas faced by people without means—might help enrich the justices’ deliberations without assuming that her identity will translate into specific kinds of votes.

I have faith in the possibility that judges can move beyond their histories because I worked for the man whom Judge Sotomayor has been nominated to replace: David Souter. Justice Souter was one of the remarkable judges who consistently looked beyond himself for answers to the questions the court was asked to resolve. Consider his voting-rights jurisprudence. Souter was perhaps the least politically connected person on the court, and he came from a racially homogenous home state with little experience with the Voting Rights Act. Yet Souter ended up carving out a position on the relationship between race and voting that was more nuanced and more pragmatic than his brethren’s. It’s what made him a great justice, and there's no reason to think that Judge Sotomayor won't become one as well.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges

Meghan, I agree that the issue isn't really one of reverse-discrimination, even if think Hanna is right that Sotomayor's views on affirmative action may sound dated to some contemporary ears. Rather, the issue, I think, is similar to one that arose during last year's Democratic presidential primary. Then the election was often portrayed in terms of identity politics, much as Sotomayor's nomination is now. It was black (Obama) v. woman (Hillary), with criticisms of either dismissed as so much racism or sexism. But to me, the far more distinguishing characteristic of both candidates, and of Sotomayor, has less to do with their sex or skin color than with their respective ages. Indeed, it's nearly impossible to understand how race or gender played out in their lives until you know when they were born.

Obama, crucially, is 14 years younger than Hillary. As a result, he wasn't part of the civil rights movement. He was a beneficiary of the civil rights movement—and there's a big difference. For all the genuine obstacles he overcame, he enjoyed a kind of ease and place in the world that for many black men (or women of any color) would have been unfathomable even 15 years earlier. By the time he reached adulthood, for example, it wasn't unusual for an accomplished man to marry a graduate of Princeton (which didn’t admit women until 1969). This, in turn, surely informed his and Michelle's relationship and marriage going forward.

By contrast, Hillary wasn’t the beneficiary of the women's rights movement. Being so much older, she was the women’s rights movement—and as a result, her life and career are necessarily messier and full of more contradictions than for younger women, for whom she helped blaze a trail. Much of what people criticized her for during the election—her stridency, her career and romantic choices, her voice and ever-changing hairstyles, even her privilege—always struck me as largely a function simply of her having come first.

Sotomayor is almost exactly seven years older than Obama and seven years younger than Hillary—a lifetime, in many ways, in both directions. She could attend Princeton (as Hillary could not), but was in only the fourth class to admit women—a far cry, presumably, from Michelle’s experience nearly a decade later, when women and minorities were no longer such a novelty. In sum, part of the diversity Sotomayor will bring to the court, if confirmed, is not merely her sex or ethnicity, but how both have interacted with the particular age in which she grew up—which is as different from mine as it is from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s and Sandra Day O’Connor’s. To that older generation of women, Sotomayor's outspokenness that Dahlia and Emily have alluded to is probably as unfamiliar as it is to women in their 20s. In the confirmation process, it will be interesting to learn how Sotomayor's perspective has adjusted, over the years, as the world has changed around her. But in asking that her present temper her past (rather than the other way around), I hope we won't deny, as I sometimes felt we did with Hillary, the age-related uniqueness of her story.

Tags: ageism, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Obama, Princeton, racism, sexism, Sonia Sotomayor