Judge Sotomayor, Legal Realist?

In 1996, Judge Sonia Sotomayor delivered a speech to law students about professional morality. She then turned it into a law review article, Returning Majesty to the Law and Politics: A Modern Approach, 30 Suffolk U.L. Rev. 35 (1996)(with Nicole A. Gordon). The article gave Wall Street Journal Supreme Court reporter Jess Bravin sufficient fodder to declare Sotomayor a legal realist because she opened the article with a discussion of Jerome Frank's classic Law and the Modern Mind (1930). See Legal Realism Informs Judge's Views. Quoting Frank, of course, is the "stuff" speakers routinely do to lead into a discussion of the public's distrust of lawyers and the legal process before an audience of law students. As Chicago Law Prof Brian Leiter writes, Bravin's Sotomayor's article is "thin." See Leiter's Law School Reports blog post for more. [JH]