Sotomayor, Minnow, Objectivity and the Intellectual Left

So, I've gotten some grief for pointing out (here) that some things Sotomayor said in the Olmos lecture suggest (but by no means entail) that she is sympathetic with (though not necessarily gripped by) certain views on the extreme intellectual left. (I was also careful to note that I think her actual decisions are more important than a few philosophical speculations in one academic talk.)

Now, given how much care I took to make my claims modest, I've been a little surprised by certain reactions to them. Some folks already seem committed to Sotomayor, whereas I'm genuinely neutral about her. I want to know what she thinks, but I have no antecedent commitment to (nor against) her.

As I noted in the post in question, Sotomayor professes agreement with Martha Minnow on the following point:

there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging,

As I also noted, there's a more benign and less benign reading of that claim. I also noted that I'd be fairly surprised if she believed the less benign one, but that's to invoke a principle of charity; what she says is ambiguous as between the two.

Well, let me just add another data point, found via one minute on the Google--a passage from a review of Professor Minnow's book Law Stories (co-authored with Gary Bellow), discussing the alleged method and philosophical orientation of the work:

This narrative, or cultural, turn, as it is sometimes called, challenges conventional scholarship by questioning the usual pairings between disinterest and knowledge, distance and objectivity, generality and truth. Rather than celebrating objectivity, generality, and precision -- the goals of social science -- narrative scholarship claims both to reveal truth and to unsettle power by separating these couples. Narrative scholarship seeks to incorporate subjective, contextualized, and particularistic accounts of social life as the object, method, and report of research (see Ewick and Silbey 1995). By displaying the relays of interaction and ambiguous meanings within any social encounter or setting, scholars can not only dislodge simplistic models of lawyering and legal decision making, they are also more accurately representing human reason and understanding.

The two virtues that have been claimed for narrative -- to reveal truth and to unsettle power -- are not separate or unrelated. Indeed, the political commitment to giving voice and bearing witness through narrative is underwritten by the epistemological conviction that there is no single, objectively apprehended truth. Conversely, the espitemological [sic] claim that there are multiple truths is based on the recognition that knowledge is socially and politically produced. Together, the two claims regarding narrative scholarship argue that the stories which have been buried, silenced, or obscured by the conventional methods of both social scientific and legal scholarship have the capacity to undermine the illusion of an objective, naturalized world which so often sustains inequality and subordination.[*]

To repeat some crucial bits for emphasis:

Indeed, the political commitment to giving voice and bearing witness through narrative is underwritten by the epistemological conviction that there is no single, objectively apprehended truth. Conversely, the epistemological claim that there are multiple truths is based on the recognition that knowledge is socially and politically produced.

So, it seems that Professor Minnow believes:

(i) There is no single, objectively apprehended truth
(ii) There are multiple truths
(iii) Truths are socially and politically produced.

Now, this is like a hit-parade of confused claims. We get alethic pluralism...we get a hint at skepticism...we get relativism/social constructionism...and from the above, we can add: particularlism. But I'm not currently interested in the truth or falsehood of the claims here. Rather, I'm interested in the facts that:

(a) These are uncontroversially claims characteristic of the far intellectual left.
(b) These are claims apparently endorsed by Professor Minnow.
(c) These are claims that are very much in the vicinity of the "no objectivity" claim discussed in the last post

My conclusion: this supports my contention that Sotomayor may (may) have been expressing sympathy for some far-intellectual-left positions. Note that she does not simply assert that there is "no objective stance" and "no neutrality"--she says:

...because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, "to judge is an exercise of power" and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging," I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions.

That is, in effect, she says: I agree with Minnow--there is no objective stance. Therefore, we can get some traction on what Sotomayor may mean by finding out what Minnow means. Which we just have. So, my suspicions are confirmed, though only to some extent.

What we really need to know is what Minnow means by the actual claim in question--the no-objectivity claim. But I haven't been able to find it yet.

Let me repeat for the benefit of my liberal friends: I'm not on an anti-Sotomayor jihad. I just think we ought to know what she thinks, and I don't see why we should bend over backwards to pretend that there's no prima facie cause for a bit of concern. I've long thought that it's a real weakness of liberalism that it's too easy on the illiberal left. If a conservative were up for SCOTUS, and was saying a bunch of things that suggested sympathy with the divine command theory, we wouldn't be dismissing concerns as silly and unworthy of attention. In fact, when Bork was up, liberals were freaking out about him accepting a kind of natural law account. So there is precedent for attending to the philosophical views of SCOTUS nominees.

[* It's important to note that this passage is describing an approach to legal scholarship, not to adjudicating cases. So we'd have to sort that out if we were to get really serious about this.]