At the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog, Suzanne Sataline asks Doug Kmiec, “How has [Judge Sotomayor’s] faith shaped her legal decisions and what can we expect from her?”
I’m certain this is the way she sees her faith, that life means not just the moment of conception, not just the moment of death, but every moment in between. And we have obligations to each other….She sees all of the aspects of the Catholic faith….The Catholic faith has become so identified with a single issue in this country in the last two decades, that even Catholics forget sometimes the fullness of their faith.
The fact that Judge Sotomayor has a fuller understanding of the social obligations of the Catholic church, well, I don’t think means she’s going to be looking for opportunities to write those obligations into the law. But I do think it’s a set of qualities that go into the package that we call discernment, that we call empathy. Someone who recognizes that the law can have pretty serious economic and social consequences and that those consequences need to be fully understood as the law is interpreted.
Read the full interview here, and see previous here & there coverage of Sotomayor’s nomination here.