A Hispanic to the Supreme Court? Acaso sí. The first? Ciertamente no!
May 2, 2009
I became weary of hearing proponents of then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales’s possible nomination to the Supreme Court claim that he would be the first Hispanic to sit on the court. Now, with the imminent retirement of Justice David Souter and the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, talk is being revived of the first Hispanic to sit on the court.
Even President Obama’s appointment of the Hispanic Judge Sotomayor to the Court would not make her the first Hispanic to serve on the highest court of the land.
The first Hispanic to sit on the Supreme Court was Benjamin Cardozo, whom President Hoover appointed to the court in 1932 to fill the seat left vacant by the retirement of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Perhaps we forget Cardozo because of historical amnesia. Or perhaps being eligible for two ethnic subcategories requires that a choice be made of one or the other, so that since Cardozo is both Jewish and Hispanic, once we label him the second Jew to be appointed to the court—Louis Brandeis was the first—he is ineligible to be considered Hispanic, even though he is of Sephardic (Spanish Jewish) ancestry. Or perhaps when we say “Hispanic,” we mean only “New World Hispanic,” in which case we should say so.
Of course, ideally it would be desirable if we could reach the point at which we no longer think in terms of labels, ethnic or other, so that when a candidate is nominated to the Supreme Court, that person is identified simply in terms of jurisprudential qualifications.
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