Coomenting on the Sotomayor nomination, Ben Shapiro writes (in part) in Townhall: 

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama nominated Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor, 54, a graduate of Yale Law School and a liberal rewriter of the Constitution, to replace Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. The pick is a bad one primarily because Sotomayor is the living embodiment of legal realist theory: She makes decisions based on her own political and social experiences.

As Sotomayor puts it, judges should consider their “experiences as women and people of color” while hearing cases, and those experiences should “affect our decisions.” And Latinas are especially qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, according to Sotomayor: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

In short, Sotomayor believes that law, like beauty, is entirely in the eye of the beholder. It is therefore of vital importance which beholders are sitting on the Supreme Court. Judicial philosophy is irrelevant, in this view; the only true judicial philosophy is personal philosophy.

The idea of impartial justice – law courts, juries, advocates for the defense, rules of evidence – is quintessentially masculine. Being as nearly empty of emotion as any societal human activity can be, it is not what most women and the political left feel comfortable with.

Justice can never be perfect, but the pursuit of it is an indispensible necessity if civil societies are to exist at all.

There are signs that the United States under the rule of the left may be giving up the pursuit of objective justice and replacing it with a competition for pity, so that criminals and civil litigants will make their cases not by presenting facts and argument but by striving to wring tears from their fellow citizens. Those who make the most abject spectacle of themselves and present a list of the most pathetic miseries will gain the ruling in their favor – provided that the fellow citizen authorized to pronounce the verdict is someone of the accused or plaintiff’s own sex, race, and economic class, otherwise how could the ‘judge’ be expected to understand the quality of the emotional self-expression underlying the crime or dispute?

What will be the result of this change?  Rather than trust the feelings of some sentimental lady on a bench, we will be compelled to take justice in our hands, keep ourselves perpetually armed, and make no contract that we cannot ourselves enforce by credible threats of vengeance.

So let ‘s do the worst we can for ourselves, invite affliction, or let’s go and buy guns while we still may.