Previous rulings
[edit] Intellectual property
In New York Times Co. v. Tasini, freelance journalists sued the New York Times Company for copyright infringement for the Times inclusion in an electronic archival database (LexisNexis) the work of freelancers it had published. Sotomayor (who was then a District Judge) ruled that the publisher had the right to license the freelancer's work. This decision was reversed on appeal, and the Supreme Court upheld the reversal; two dissenters (John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer) took Sotomayor's position.[40]
In Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group, Sotomayor ruled that a book of trivia from the television program Seinfeld infringed on the copyright of the show's producer and did not constitute legal fair use. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld Sotomayor's ruling.
[edit] Abortion
In Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush,[41] Sotomayor upheld the Bush administration's implementation of the "Mexico City Policy" which requires foreign organizations receiving U.S. funds to "neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations". Sotomayor held that the policy did not constitute a violation of equal protection, as the government "is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds".[42]
[edit] First Amendment rights
In Pappas v. Giuliani[43], Sotomayor dissented from her colleagues’ ruling that the NYPD could terminate an employee from his desk job who sent racist materials through the mail. Sotomayor argued that the First Amendment protected speech by the employee “away from the office, on [his] own time,” even if that speech was “offensive, hateful, and insulting," and that therefore the employee's First Amendment claim should have gone to trial rather than being dismissed on summary judgment.
[edit] Fourth Amendment rights
In N.G. ex rel. S.G. v. Connecticut[44], Sotomayor dissented from her colleagues’ decision to uphold a series of strip searches of “troubled adolescent girls” in juvenile detention centers. While Sotomayor agreed that some of the strip searches at issue in the case were lawful, she would have held that due to the “the severely intrusive nature of strip searches,” they should not be allowed “in the absence of individualized suspicion, of adolescents who have never been charged with a crime.” She argued that an "individualized suspicion" rule was more consistent with Second Circuit precedent than the majority's rule.
In Leventhal v. Knapek[45], Sotomayor rejected a Fourth Amendment challenge by a public employee whose employer searched his office computer. She held that “[e]ven though [the employee] had some expectation of privacy in the contents of his office computer, the investigatory searches by the DOT did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights” because here “there were reasonable grounds for suspecting” the search would reveal evidence of “work-related misconduct.”
[edit] Employment Discrimination
Sotomayor was a member of the Second Circuit panel in a high-profile case that held that the City of New Haven could throw out its promotional test for firefighters and start over with a new test, because the City believed the test had a "disparate impact" on minority firefighters and it might therefore be subject to a lawsuit from minority firefighters if it certified the test results. (No black firefighters qualified for promotion under the test, whereas some had qualified under tests used in previous years.) Instead, white firefighters sued the City, claiming that their rights were violated because the test was thrown out.[46][47] The case was recently heard by the U.S. Supreme Court as Ricci v. DeStefano,[48] and a ruling has not yet been issued. |
