I see you took the comments about the firefighters directly from a Heritage FOundation article by Hans Von Spakovsky, a conservative who had to withdraw his name from nomination to the FEC in 2007 because he couldn't get confirmed after several attorneys who used to work for him accused him of "excessive partisanship".
An overview doesn't seem to support your general opinion(or his), but your mind is made up, so I will withdraw after this.
Over her ten years on the circuit court, Sotomayor has heard appeals in more than 3,000 cases and has written about 380 opinions where she was in the majority.[9] The Supreme Court reviewed five of those, reversing three and affirming two[9]—not high numbers for an appellate judge of that many years[14] and a typical percentage of reversals.[99]
Sotomayor's circuit court rulings have led to her being considered a political centrist by the ABA Journal[62][100] and other sources and organizations.[62][79][100][101][102][103] Several lawyers, legal experts, and news organizations identify her as someone who has liberal inclinations.[104][105][106] In any case, the Second Circuit's caseload typically skews more toward business and securities law rather than hot-button social or constitutional issues.[14] Sotomayor has tended to write narrowly formed rulings that rely upon close application of the law rather than import general philosophical viewpoints.[14] A Congressional Research Service analysis found that Sotomayor's rulings defied easy ideological categorization, but did show an adherence to precedent, an emphasis on the facts of a case, and an avoidance of overstepping the circuit court's judicial role.[107] Unusually, Sotomayor reads through all the supporting documents of cases under review; her lengthy rulings explore every aspect of a case and tend to feature leaden, ungainly prose.[108] Some legal experts have said that the attention to detail and re-examining of facts of a case in her rulings came close to overstepping the traditional role of appellate judges.[109]
Across some 150 cases involving business and civil law, Sotomayor's rulings are generally unpredictable and do not represent consistently pro-business or anti-business tendencies.[110] Sotomayor's influence in the federal judiciary, as measured by the number of citations of her rulings by other judges and in law review articles, has increased significantly during the length of her appellate judgeship and has been greater than that of some other prominent federal appeals court judges.[111]
.. a study of 50 racial discrimination cases brought before her panel showed that 45 of them were rejected, with Sotomayor never filing a dissent.[35] An expanded study showed that Sotomayor has decided 97 cases involving a claim of discrimination and has rejected those claims nearly 90 percent of the time.[116] Another examination of Second Circuit split decisions on cases that dealt with race and discrimination showed no clear ideological pattern in Sotomayor's opinions.[117]
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