Anyone who says a judge’s background and experiences do not influence his or her decisionmaking on the bench is either a fool or a liar.Contradicting the caricatures of judicial decisionmaking offered up by critics of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, judges themselves have long acknowledged that they are not simple deciders of fact and law, untouched by any human consideration. Anticipating the findings of modern psychology by nearly a century, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes confessed in 1881, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudice judges share with their fellow men, have a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.”

In trying to rally public opinion against Judge Sotomayor, her opponents have attempted to delegitimize the influence of a judge’s background on his or her opinions, setting a standard for judicial decisions that judges themselves recognize is absurd. Judge Richard Posner, a card-carrying conservative and Reagan appointee to the federal bench, labeled that standard “self-deception.” “A judge,” he wrote, “is more comfortable believing his decisions are compelled by ‘the law’ – something external to his own preferences – than by his personal ideology, intuitions, or suite of emotions