If you watch carefully as Sotomayor repeats the judicial oath administered to her by Chief Justice John Roberts, you’ll notice that each time she closes her eyes briefly, as if in prayer:

Sotomayor may be a lapsed Catholic, but by placing her hand on the Holy Bible and swearing to “support and defend the Constitution … and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” as well as to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich” and to “faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all of the duties incumbent upon me …under the Constitution and laws of the United States” she is making a solemn oath not only to the American people but to G-d.

It is not a promise she can break casually - in part because of who she is at her core, before she became the “wise Latina” who, paradoxically, wasn’t wise enough to avoid publicly stating that white men can’t judge (video), and that judges are often legislators by another name (video).

She was once a minority who spoke English as a second language, and whose family struggled financially after her father died. And she found herself at a disadvantage in Peter Winn’s Contemporary Latin America course at Princeton University, compared to other students who came from families wealthy enough to send them to elite private schools:

The first time she walked into my office … Sonia Sotomayor was holding a paper she'd written … It was marked up with my corrections in red ink. Spanish was her first language, and many of her errors reflected its syntax. Where she had written "dictatorship of authority," I had scribbled "authoritarian dictatorship." …

She was not the best student I taught in my seven years at Princeton - though she certainly was high on the list - but she was the one who took greatest advantage of the opportunities there and emerged most transformed by her experience. …

With most students, the time I spent marking up papers was largely wasted. But Sonia took the comments seriously. She sought me out to go over her essays. In each paper, I would focus on a different shortcoming: Spanglish, tenses, passive voice. Taking such constant criticism could not have been easy, but Sonia kept coming back. She even read grammar books during her summer breaks. …

Sonia's thesis capped a stellar Princeton career. During her last two years, she received A's in almost all her courses, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. In her comprehensive history exams, she received an A-plus from the most difficult grader in the department.  

Sotomayor took the criticism of her writing to heart and worked as hard as she could to live up to her professor’s exacting standards. One of a handful of Hispanics at Princeton at the time, she was a pioneer and her failure wouldn’t be hers alone. And neither would her success. This same ethnic pride has propelled generations of immigrants to study hard in school, so as to bring honor to their families, their communities and their people.

Assuming a role not unlike a professor, in his opening remarks at the beginning of the confirmation process, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) lectured Sotomayor on the meaning of the judicial oath to administer justice equally, faithfully and impartially under the Constitution and laws of the United States:

These principles give the traditional system its moral authority, which is why Americans respect and accept the rulings of courts - even when they lose.

Indeed, our legal system is based on a firm belief in an ordered universe and objective truth. The trial is the process by which the impartial and wise judge guides us to the truth.

Down the other path lies a Brave New World where words have no true meaning and judges are free to decide what facts they choose to see. In this world, a judge is free to push his or her own political and social agenda. I reject this view.

Under the glare of the spotlight trained on her as the first Hispanic elevated to the high court, Sotomayor could still feel she has something to prove. Just as she took her professor’s criticisms to heart and worked diligently to turn in the best papers she could, so too she may take Sessions’ admonishment to heart and completely reject President Barack Hussein Obama’s “empathy standard” for judging cases – and in so doing, prove Sessions wrong for voting against her.

Various assessments of her record of more than 4,000 cases - including some 100 race-related cases – suggest she is not a wild-eyed liberal. Her decisions have been characterized as “within the mainstream of Democratic judicial appointees” (The Wall Street Journal) and “be[lying] easy categorization along any ideological spectrum,” while her respect for precedent "would be in line with the judicial philosophy of Justice Souter" (the Congressional Research Service), and she “often reaches liberal results through conservative means … well within the bounds of the law” (The Washington Post).

Some examples from Sotomayor’s 11 years as an appellate judge:

† She ruled for a black child in a racial discrimination case against his school - but tossed out race and age discrimination claims by a black nurse who had been fired from a NY hospital.

† She ruled to uphold a ban on possession of pornography by a paroled sex offender, finding that the definition of “pornography” is not unconstitutionally vague - but would have allowed the wrongful termination suit by a NYC police officer fired for sending out racist fliers to proceed (her dissent admonished the majority for “gloss[ing] over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives because it is confronted with speech it does not like”).

† She was in the minority in wanting the full court to hear the appeal of black plaintiffs whose discrimination claims were dismissed by a three judge panel, which thought it reasonable for police to check the hands of 200 minorities after a robbery victim described her attacker as being black and having a cut on his hand - but sided with state troopers who had "ample probable cause" to support searches of two vehicles and were "within the context of the automobile exception a reasonable search does not become unreasonable because law enforcement officials lack a warrant."  

And Sotomayor’s ruling in Maloney v. Cuomo (AKA the “nunchucks” case)  that the Second Amendment does not bar state and local ordinances restricting ownership of weapons - the Supreme Court’s Heller ruling notwithstanding - became less controversial when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago reached the same conclusion. The three judges on the Seventh Circuit had been appointed by Republican presidents - and they agreed with Sotomayor and the two judges on the Second Circuit who had been appointed by President Bill Clinton. Ensuring that the question gets kicked to the high court, a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit panel in San Francisco - one appointed by a Republican president, two appointed by Democrats – disagree with the other six judges, ruling that the Second Amendment does apply to state governments. Clearly, this is not a cut-and-dried issue that falls neatly into an ideological box.

Sotomayor’s six years as a trial judge and 11 years as an appellate judge provide a yardstick as to how liberal she may be. Stony Brook University political science professor Jeffrey Segal pegs Sotomayor as being about as liberal as Stephen Breyer, and political science researchers at the University of Tennessee predict she will vote with the other liberal justices in 71 percent of civil rights cases and in 56 percent in economic cases during her first term.

The bottom line: Sotomayor is unlikely to drift to the right the way Souter drifted to the left – but neither will she change the outcome on cases where the Supreme Court splits 5 to 4. As the swing vote, The National Law Journal notes that during the Supreme Court term that just ended, “Kennedy was in the majority in more 5-4 decisions (18) than any justice in more than 50 years.” According to The WaPo’s tally, Kennedy is twice as likely to swing right than to swing left:

This term, the justices split 5 to 4 in 24 cases, a third of the total. Kennedy sided with the four most conservative justices - Roberts, Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas - in 13 of the 5 to 4 cases, while backing liberals John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer just six times. In five other 5 to 4 cases, the court did not split along liberal-conservative lines.

Thus, given her judicial record, it’s those handful of cases that do not split along ideological lines that Sotomayor can have the most impact.

Editorial Note: As an ethnic who comes from a warm-blooded people herself, The Stiletto noticed one other thing: At the conclusion of the swearing in, Sotomayor and her mother hugged  the way ethnics do – not a brief, stiff-armed lunge towards one another that’s over in the blink of an eye, but full-body contact, rocking back and forth. Knowing how much her widowed mother sacrificed so she (and her physician brother) could become successful, productive citizens Sotomayor will surely not let her down now by ending up on a list like this one that ranks the “Ten Worst Supreme Court Justices.”