Judge Sonia Sotomayor has already stood out as a voice in support of diversity issues as they pertain to students. In fact, at her recent confirmation hearing, she was once again questioned about her views on diversity in education. To these questions, Sotomayer offered a recap of the Supreme Court’s Grutter v. Bollinger decision as well a the Gratz v. Bollinger decision, in which the court upheld a Michigan law school’s admission policy that considered race as well as other individual criteria. Yet, the court did not support a race-conscious admission plan used for the school’s main undergraduate program, which used a more mechanized methodology for selecting students.

Sotomayor maintained that these types of situations should always be “looked at individually.”
Sotomayor was also questioned about the Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education case, from which she had written a partial dissent from the other judges. In her dissent, she maintained that racial discrimination had occurred against a black student attending an elementary school in Connecticut, having said, “I consider the treatment this loan black child encountered during his brief time in Cook Hill’s first grade to have been … unprecedented and contrary to the school’s established policies.” She did, however, agree with the 2nd Circuit panel in that the school had not acted with “deliberate indifference” to the hostility the student had allegedly faced at school. On the other hand, she did agree with the family’s claim that the child was demoted to kindergarten halfway through his first grade year due to his race.

After being lauded for her dissent, Sotomayor went on to say, “In that case, there was a disparate treatment element, and I pointed out to the set of facts that showed or presented evidence of that disparate treatment. That’s the quote that you were reading from, that this was a sole child who was treated completely different than other children of — of a different race in the services that he was provided with and in the opportunities he was given to remedy or to receive remedial help. That is obviously different, because what you’re looking at is the law as it exists and the promise that the law makes to every citizen of equal treatment in that situation.”