Category: 
by Hector N. Fertig
Two quick points:
I apologize to those for whom this is obvious, but some readers may not be familiar with the roles that judges play at different levels in the United States. As a Federal Appellate Court Judge, Sotomayor doesn’t really have authority to ignore any United States Supreme Court decision, including Kelo. Though I haven’t looked up the Didden case, if there were no legal problems with the decision, it’s not her place, generally, to ignore the finder of fact in the lower court. Sotomayor’s job is primarily judicial review of legal determinations rather than rehearing the facts of a case (there are some exceptions, of course).
Second, without actually sitting through the trial, it is very easy to be mislead regarding the merits of one side or the other. This doesn’t stop people from making sweeping conclusions based upon them but it probably should. As an example, everyone is familiar with the woman who spilled coffee on herself at McDonald’s and won a million dollar settlement in a classic case of a run-away jury. The other side of the story (the woman received terrible burns across much of her body, McDonald’s had been warned that they were over-heating their coffee and that this posed a danger to the public and McDonald’s specifically chose to ignore these warnings as they felt it would be cheaper to litigate than to change their behavior) is rarely heard. My point is only that hearing one side of a story is generally not enough to draw an informed conclusion.
