When legendary appeals judge Learned Hand did not like how the U.S. Supreme Court disposed of one of his cases in 1954, he protested privately to Justice Felix Frankfurter. “I felt…a sense of professional incapacity,” Hand confessed in a letter, according to Gerald Gunther’s 2004 biography of Hand. “It does serve as a warning…that what may seem to oneself [entirely clear] may seem to others plain tosh” or nonsense.
Now Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, a judge who like Hand served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit, finds herself under intense scrutiny for the handful of times that the court reversed her decisions. Reversal is a common if sometimes painful part of life for appellate judges, but rarely has it been scrutinized so closely as last week.
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