If Sonia Sotomayor's autobiography has nothing at all about law or even politics...

... why would anyone read it?

The book, which covers her life prior to becoming a judge, barely says a word about the Constitution and even less about ideology. Yet one doesn't get the sense that politics were scrubbed from the text; it is rather that the topic isn't of much interest to the author.

That's what a good scrubbing job would do. So there's no bad scrubbing job leaving interesting residue.

One wishes she had shared her intellectual interests with us or discussed the books that captured her fancy or influenced her thinking, since she remarks more than once in "My Beloved World" that the library was a refuge for her as a schoolgirl and later at Princeton. Disclosing the names of books that influenced a childhood wouldn't compromise pending or future cases.

Welcome to the post-Bork world — a "beloved" world? — where judges are dutiful, neutral case processors. The very quality that makes a judge the kind of judge we've come to require — post-Bork — will embody a form of expression antithetical to a good memoir.

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"But what 'borking' really amounted to was holding the nominee’s vigorously expressed views up to the light for public inspection."

Says Linda Greenhouse:

In five days of testimony, then-Judge Bork – a former professor of mine whom I liked and respected – had every opportunity to make his case. His ideas were fully aired and considered. By a vote of 58 to 42, the senators, having heard from their constituents, concluded that his constricted constitutional vision, locked into the supposed “original intention” of the framers, was not what the country needed or wanted....

... Robert Bork couldn’t accept the legitimacy of his defeat.... Judge Bork was hardly unique in his sense of entitlement, but it ran so deep that it prevented him from understanding the obvious dynamic of what happened. Because he had been nominated to fill the “swing seat” vacated by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., a moderate conservative whose retirement left nearly every issue of constitutional moment hanging in the balance, his nomination became a public referendum on whether the court should move decisively to the right or stay basically the same. The status quo won out.

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