Some questions for Sonia Sotomayor

In case you've spent the past few weeks on Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars, let me bring you up to date.

The President's nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, said in a speech in 2002 that "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."  [UPDATE 6/3: She said something similar in 1994, too.]

I would offer a few questions for the judge to answer.

1. Does this apply to Latinos, too? That is, would a wise Latino man with the richness of his experiences also reach a better conclusion than a white man?

2. If so, would a wise Latina reach a better conclusion than a wise Latino, or would they reach equally good conclusions? Who has richer experiences?

3. Does it matter which background the wise Latina comes from? Would Latinas of Puerto Rican descent with the richness of their experiences reach equally good conclusions with Latinas of Mexican or Cuban descent with the richness of their experiences?

4. Would a wise African-American judge, with the richness of his (or her) experiences, also reach a better conclusion than a white man? Better than a white woman? Better or worse than a Latina?

5. Please rank wise judges from the following ethnic or racial groups of men and women in order of the quality of conclusions they would reach, given the relative richness or poverty of their experiences, starting from the highest and ending at the lowest:

(a) White men.
(b) White women.
(c) Latinas.
(d) Latinos.
(e) African-American men.
(f) African-American women.
(g) Chinese-Americans.
(h) Hawaiian/Asian-Pacific Islanders.
(i) Native Americans.
(j) Arab-Americans.
(k) Jewish women.
(l) Jewish men.

6. On a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 is a person with terminally impoverished experiences and 100 is a person with experiences that are rich beyond imagination, please assign a number to each of the racial and ethnic groups you have ranked in answer to question 5.

7. All three of Obama's nominees to the courts of appeals have been men. Will the one African-American man with the richness of his experiences reach better conclusions than the two white men? If so, couldn't the President have nominated men or women with richer experiences than theirs?

Thank you.