Still, it’s a good question: when do you overturn established law? Phrased that way, neither Roberts nor Alito have covered themselves with glory, as they tend to rely upon stare decisis as well.

I knew that and I’m an extremely casual Astros fan.

Judge Sotomayor, in her testimony yesterday, asserted that “Few judges could claim they love baseball more than I do” and that she “grew up … watching baseball.” But a March 28, 1995, story in USA Today, titled “U.S. District judge not a baseball fan,” stated that Sotomayor “grew up a few miles from Yankee Stadium but says she knows little about the sport.” And yesterday she said that “many residents of Washington, D.C. have asked me to look at the Senators” as her new team. But as even a casual baseball fan would know, the D.C. team is the Nationals, not the Senators.

And we right-of-center types are usually the ones who venerate precedent. (We do it as a mechanism of judicial restraint.) So even if, as I suspect, Judge Sotomayor is only paying lip service to a conservative understanding of the law, it says something that she feels the need to pay that lip service, no?

Regards,
Peter H.

If the left’s ideas are really in ascendancy, why can’t she let her affirmative-action, internal law, judicial activist freak flag fly?

Lets not forget that she testified yesterday: American law does not permit the use of foreign law or international law to interpret the Constitution. That’s a given. And my speech explained that, as you noted, explicitly. There is no debate on that question; there’s no issue about that question.

but said in a speech, referenced here:
In both those cases, Judge Sotomayor said, the court was using the foreign or international law to “help us understand what the concepts meant to other countries and . . . whether our understanding of our own constitutional rights fell into the mainstream of human thinking.”

Andrew McCarthy summed it up best