Epistemological Honesty on the Bench

Barack Obama has nominated Sonia Sotomayor to fill David Souter's seat on the Supreme Court. I don't know much about her on the merits; I was idiosyncratically rooting for Kathleen Sullivan, who I had met while I was a grad student and impressed me as uncommonly brilliant. One thing that immediately strikes you about Sotomayor is her personal history -- raised in housing projects in the Bronx by a single Mom, she fought her way up to graduate summa cum laude from Princeton, and then to law school at Yale where she edited the Law Review. Doesn't mean she'll be a great Justice, but it's an impressive record. The opposition research has been out for a while, of course, because that's how politics works. One of the things brought up by Sotomayor's critics is this clip, where she talks about the difference in emphasis between a district court and an appellate court. (Appellate courts need to look beyond the facts of the case to consider implications of setting precedent for future decisions.) This clip drives people crazy, because she says that the courts of appeals are "where policy is made." You're not supposed to say that! (As Sotomayor immediately jokes.) The legislatures make the laws, and the courts are merely referees, interpreting the words of the statutes by lights of their objective and unchanging meanings. In reality, of course, Sotomayor is simply telling the truth -- a cardinal sin in law as well as politics. In law and politics, and for that matter theology, we are presented with a sacred text of one form or another. And we are supposed to pretend that the text has a One True Meaning -- we may, of course, argue at great length about the proper procedure for divining what that meaning actually is, but admitting that the text is inherently ambiguous (or even contradictory) is not allowed. We need to act as if the authors of Leviticus and the Framers of the Constitution were trying to say something very clear about contemporary debates, if only we had the interpretational acumen to figure out what it was. Which is why, as much as I enjoy the rest of the world of human endeavor, science will always be my true home. Our job is to interpret the natural world, which really is unambiguous and non-contradictory, if only we can make sense of its behavior. Other fields have a professional obligation to pretend that there are right and wrong answers, but we actually have them. Yet another way in which being a scientist is so much easier than other jobs.