By Mark Sherman
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Justice David Souter never danced the salsa in public.
Justice John Paul Stevens doesn’t sing in karaoke bars.
And Chief Justice John Roberts hasn’t thrown out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium.
But that was yesterday’s Supreme Court.
The newest justice, Sonia Sotomayor, has done all three of those things — in the less than two months since she replaced Souter on the court.
While the Supreme Court is all about the law, personalities matter. As the court begins its new term today, the justices will be dealing not only with the cases in front of them but with a wild card: how Sotomayor and her effervescence may change things.
“It’s like when you were little and a new kid joined the class,” said Stephen Wermiel, a constitutional law professor at American University.
“There was always a little air of excitement or anticipation because you didn’t know how it would change the dynamic.”
The earliest indications are that she is unlikely to affect the outcome or alter the terms of debate in two of the high-profile cases that probably will dominate the term: a challenge to limits on corporate spending in political campaigns and a lawsuit seeking to strike down local handgun bans in the Chicago area.
In both cases, conservative majorities that prevailed in earlier cases appear solid.
Sotomayor probably will side with the court’s liberals in dissent from decisions in favor of gun rights and loosening campaign finance restrictions, as the now-retired Souter did.
But other disputes loom and, to cite just one area, Sotomayor will be watched closely to see whether her past as a prosecutor makes her more sympathetic to law enforcement in criminal cases.
Unlike her colleagues, Sotomayor also has experience as a trial judge.
The criminal docket includes challenges to handing out life sentences with no chance of parole to people younger than age 18. These cases follow the court’s recent decision to bar the execution of people who committed murder as juveniles.
The court has scheduled arguments in First Amendment cases over the separation of church and state involving a cross in the Mojave National Preserve in California that serves as a World War I memorial, and free speech issues in the government’s efforts to criminalize the production of videos of dog fights and other acts of animal cruelty.
