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Thursday, June 04, 2009
Courts - "Debate on Whether Female Judges Decide Differently Arises Anew"
Neil A. Lewis writes today in the NY Times in a long article that begins:
Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, is often quoted as saying that a wise female judge will come to the same conclusion as a wise male judge.But the opposing argument was bolstered forcefully in April by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, currently the court’s only woman, in a case involving Savana Redding, a 13-year-old girl who had been strip-searched at school by the authorities on suspicion of hiding some ibuprofen pills that may be bought over-the-counter.
“They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” Justice Ginsburg said of her eight male colleagues, several of whom had suggested during oral argument that they were not troubled by the search.
“It’s a very sensitive age for a girl,” Justice Ginsburg went on to say in an interview with USA Today. “I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”
Now that President Obama has nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become the third woman in the court’s history, the question of how female judges may see and decide some cases differently is again being weighed.
Judge Sotomayor herself raised the issue of personal experience in judging and engendered mixed reviews recently for a speech she gave in 2001 in which she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
But the idea that women may inherently view the law differently on occasion is something that troubles even several female judges who believe it may be so.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 4, 2009 08:42 AM
Posted to Courts in general