Sotomayor by the Numbers

Eric Posner takes a look at Justice Sotomayor using data to evaluate her productivity, opinion quality, and independence.  The post is worth a read in its entirety, but for brevity's sake, I will just post his conclusion.

One can, however, make some rough judgments based on the disaggregated rankings. The bottom line is that Judge Sotomayor is about average, or maybe a bit below average, for a federal appellate judge. These results are far from conclusive, but one might think that put the burden on Judge Sotomayor’s defenders to come forward with stronger reasons for her nomination than they have so far. Judge Wood is stronger—I would say that she is impressive, but others might weight the factors differently.