Judge Sotomayor shows her independence

On the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Judge Sonia Sotomayor has exhibited judicial smarts and independence, offering her thoughts on cases even where she sided with the majority. Here are some examples culled from various news sources including Education Week, a weekly publication on education issues.

Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education, was a 2nd Circuit case about racial discrimination, this one involving the mid-year transfer of an African-American student at a public school in Wallingford, Conn. The student's family claimed the school deliberately discriminated against the student by showing "deliberate indifference" to racial hostility he encountered at the nearly all-white school. The school also demoted the boy to kindergarten from first grade.

Sotomayor sided with the majority in the 1999 decision, rejecting the racial-harrassment claim, but she offered a forceful dissent of the panel's conclusion that the transfer was not an act of racial discrimination.

"I consider the treatment this lone black child encountered during his brief time in Cook Hill's first grade to have been ... unprecedented and contrary to the school's established policies," she wrote in her dissent. She said that "every other Cook Hill student having academic difficulty received some form of transitional help, such as compensatory education, testing, or transitional classes ... [A] jury reasonably could conclude that the school did not give the black student an equal chance to succeed (or fail)."

Judge Sotomayor also has ruled in two lawsuits that have echoes of current education-related cases before the Supreme Court.

In the 2006 2nd Circuit case, Frank G. v. Board of Education of Hyde Park, Sotomayor was part of a unanimous decision allowing parents to be reimbursed for private school tuition for a child with disabilities. A similar case, Forest Grove School District v. T.A. (Case No. 08-305), is headed to the Supreme Court .

Another ruling Judge Sotomayor was involved in has similarities to a case to be decided by the Supreme Court, Safford Unified School District v. Redding (Case No. 08-479), which involves the strip-search of a public school student.

In the 2004 case of N.G. ex rel. S.C. v. Connecticut Judge Sotomayor was among the three 2nd Circuit appellate judges deciding a case involving strip-searches of adolescent girls at a juvenile detention facility. The panel upheld the legality of certain strip searches but said others were unreasonable. In a separate opinion, Sotomayor underscored case law's recognition of the intrusiveness of strip searches and the need for strict limits on their use.

In Bartlett v. New York State Board of Law Examiners, Sotomayor, as a federal-district court judge, ruled that a law school graduate with dyslexia was entitled to educational accommodations, including additional time, when taking the state bar exam.

Equally important to many Americans is Sotomayor's ruling 14 years ago that ended a long, rancorous baseball strike in favor of the players and against the owners. Of the moment, The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that the judge had joined forever the ranks of Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson and Ted Williams.