Sotomayor's Questionnaire Delivered to Senate

June 5, 2009 -- The White House delivered Judge Sonia Sotomayor's questionnaire to the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday as her nomination to the Supreme Court continued to trigger a larger debate about gender and the judicial process.

And as committee members parse through the 173-pages of documentation, controversy swirls surrounding past comments made by the federal appellate judge relating to gender and ethnicity.

Sotomayor is already under fire for 2001 remarks made during a diversity lecture at the University of California at Berkeley, when she said, "I would hope that a wise Latino woman, with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Sotomayor's Senate questionnaire reveals she made that point more than once.

In a 1994 speech on women in the judiciary, she said she hoped "a wise woman with the richness of her experience would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion."

These newly revealed comments appear as part of a recurring theme in Sotomayor's speech-giving history and only fuel the debate on whether gender matters in how judges make decisions.

Sandra Day O'Connor, the court's first woman justice, didn't believe it did.

"I can't see, on the issues that we address at the court, that a wise old woman is going to decide a case differently than a wise old man," O'Connor said.

But Sotomayor has specifically said she doesn't agree with O'Connor and that women, because of their experiences, are better.

"Better," Sotomayor said in that same 1994 speech, "will mean a more compassionate and caring conclusion."

On the court, O'Connor did ask how cases would affect women. In the 1996 argument of Maryland v. Wilson O'Connor challenged a lawyer who argued that police should be able to detain passengers on the roadway while they searched the driver's car.

"Suppose it's a driving snowstorm, or a blinding rainstorm, and the passenger is a mother with a very young baby," O'Connor said inside the courtroom.