SUPREME COURT nominee Sonia Sotomayor's gender and ethnicity mark her as a path-breaking figure. But she's also unique because of how far she has come in life.
A stumbling block to her Senate confirmation is one sentence in a 2001 speech she delivered at the University of California's Berkeley law school. (Why is it always Berkeley?) She said: "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."
A classic gaffe. Defined by columnist Michael Kinsley, a gaffe is blurting out the truth. Her "gaffe" was saying that how we see the world is shaped by where we come from and what we've done. Those with broader experience have a better perspective.
The country club look. In the history of the Supreme Court, there have been only 110 justices. Of those, 106 have been white men. Is it any wonder that until 1972 the Supreme Court had never ruled in favor of women in a gender discrimination case?
A bonus. Growing up poor in the South Bronx is a bonus on a resume that is rich with other experiences that a white male candidate might envy.
Consider Sotomayor vs. Roberts. Chief Justice John Roberts grew up in a comfortable home in northern Indiana, Sotomayor in a public housing project in the South Bronx. His father was an executive at a steel company, hers a factory worker who died of a heart attack when she was 9. Her mother raised her and her brother on a nurse's pay.
Here's where it gets interesting. Roberts was educated at Catholic schools, as was Sotomayor. He graduated from Harvard, she from Princeton. He got a law degree at Harvard where he was editor of the law review, he got a law degree from Yale where she was editor of the law review. He spent 13 years in private law practice, mostly representing corporate clients; she spent seven years at private law practice doing a fair amount of corporate work.
Experience matters. Just as the experience of growing up poor shaped Sotomayor, the experience of growing up comfortable shaped Roberts. He has consistently ruled in favor of corporate defendants against individual citizens.
No humble moderate. Supreme Court authority Jeffrey Toobin studied Roberts's high court record and concluded that he's part of a four-justice conservative bloc. "After four years on the Court," Toobin says, "Roberts's record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative along with Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito."
Supreme Court Inc. New York Times writer Jeffrey Rosen argues that the Roberts Court has no economic populist. That matters because the court will inevitably be drawn into far-reaching economic issues, such as the Chrysler sale to Fiat that went before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A willingness to stick up for the average worker and loophole-lacking taxpayer will be much needed as Washington decision makers instinctively stick up for corporations and banks.
The power of one voice. Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said she learned much from her colleague, the late Justice Thurgood Marshall.
"As I listened to Justice Marshall talk eloquently to the media about the social stigmas and lost opportunities suffered by African American children in state-imposed segregated school, my awareness of race-based disparities deepened. I did not, could not, know it then, but the man who would, as a lawyer and jurist, captivate the nation would also, as colleague and friend, profoundly influence me.
"Justice Marshall imparted not only his legal acumen but also his life experiences, constantly pushing and prodding us to respond not only to the persuasiveness of legal argument but also to the power of moral truth."
Frankfurter put mustard on it. The late conservative Justice Felix Frankfurter said: "The words of the Constitution are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life." I rest my case.
Dan Payne is a Boston-area media consultant who has worked for Democratic candidates around the country. 
