The half-crazed rush to try to derail the latest Supreme Court nominee by any means necessary has focused on two main points: Judge Sotomayor's proclaimed empathy makes her more inclined to 'legislate from the bench' rather than following the law, and her ruling in the Ricci case proves she believes in "race-based justice -- basically at the expense of white males, to advance people of color".  Ironically, looking at the details of the Ricci case directly contradicts the first claim.  In short: she could be one or the other, but they are mutually exclusive.  To explain, let's delve into the case:

"In 2003, the New Haven Fire Department decided to base promotions to the positions of captain and lieutenant primarily on a written exam. But the next year the city threw out the test results when all but one of the eligible candidates for promotion proved to be white. New Haven firefighter Frank Ricci, a high scorer on the test who is white, sued for reverse discrimination."

There's some more info on Frank Ricci, who is dyslexic and basically studied really, really hard to pass the exam.  And a lot of the outrage involves people thinking it sucks that he didn't get the promotion, which is more or less true.  In fact, someone with "empathy" might feel for him.  However, the law is relatively clear.  If the test results show 'disparate impact' via race, sex, or ethnic group, they violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.  Which, we might note, is what Ricci was suing them under.  Well wait a second, what the hell is disparate impact? Thankfully, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has guidelines:

"A selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group which is less than four-fifths (4/5) (or eighty percent) of the rate for the group with the highest rate will generally be regarded by the Federal enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact, while a greater than four-fifths rate will generally not be regarded by Federal enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact."

In English, it means take whichever group had the highest ratio of people passing to failing.  Then look at the others and see if there's more than a 20% difference in the relative pass rate.  So if 30 out of 100 Hispanic people passed a test, but only 50 out of 1000 white people passed it, then the test would be considered to have (possibly unintentional)  disparate impact on white people.   Now there are some issues with this, especially with lower numbers.  If, say, only three people take it, and one gets drunk the night before and does worse than usual, that could skew the results unfairly.

But the case isn't about whether the EEOC guidelines are fair.  It asked only if the city had a reasonable expectation that if it kept the test, it might be sued successfully under Article 7. Judge Sotomayor ruled that yes, the city had a legitimate reason to suspect that keeping the test would draw a lawsuit. 

Therefore, what is supposedly sending these people (Gingrich, Buchanan, Tancredo) into a frenzy is that Judge Sotomayor didn't empathize with Frank Ricci or the other (including a GASP Hispanic) passing firefighters and strike down the entire Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional, even though it was well out of the scope of the case.  Rather she coldly applied the law as written.

So pick one, conservatives, for your sake.  It'd at least give you better ground to pretend that the whole thing isn't racist if your arguments were internally consistent.   Although with all this insane bullshit about La Raza it's like you're not even trying anymore.