Opinion: It’s About Time America Had its First Female Supreme Court Justice
When I first set up my law practice in Larely, a lot of my DUI defendants would ask me, “Toddrick, do you think there will ever be a female justice on the Supreme Court?” No matter how many times I was asked this question, I always wanted to answer “yes”, but I hesitated because I wasn’t sure if our country would be ready for it.
It’s obvious to everyone that women have come a long way over the past generation. They’re no longer are pigeonholed into smoking slim ultra-light menthol 120 cigarettes and they’re also starting to become accepted as commonplace in most professional work environments. Heck, we even had a female vice-presidential candidate this past election. But even with those amazing accomplishments, part of me always felt like the Supreme Court mountain was too high for feminine hands to climb.
However, all of that changed this week with Barack Obama’s nomination of appellate judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice Souter, who is retiring. While she undoubtedly faces a tough confirmation process full of partisanship and politics, perhaps all Americans, liberal and conservative, should take a step back and look at the big picture here. This is an amazingly historical event that a lot of us didn’t know if we’d see during our lifetime and special attention needs to be paid to that fact.
The day the news broke about Judge Sotomayor, I called my daughter, who lives in the dorms over at UC-Larely, to ask what the reaction among female students on campus seemed to be. She told me that there was a noticeable buzz around campus and that she heard female students everywhere telling one another that so long as they didn’t want to be President, Vice-President, or a C.E.O. of a major company, they knew they could be anything they wanted to be. My daughter also told me that she felt very empowered by that.
After we got off the phone, I paused for a few moments of introspection, and realized that after all these years of wondering, I was surprised, nay, disappointed that this hadn’t happened sooner. But as Mark McGwire so boldly taught us, the past isn’t important. It’s the future we need to concern ourselves with. And with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, the future for women looks a whole lot brighter.
