Sotomayor Helps Puerto Rico Argue Its Bankruptcy Case

Bloomberg View via Yahoo! Finance ^ | 23 Mar 2016 | Noah Feldman

[oblomov]

Before Tuesday, I’d have said that Puerto Rico had no chance to win its legal fight to let its municipalities and utilities declare bankruptcy. That's how the island hopes to resolve its overwhelming debt problems, but the federal bankruptcy code says that it can't.

That's what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit held last summer, unanimously. The statute seemed so clear that even Judge Juan Torruella, the appellate court’s only Puerto Rican member, concurred in an outraged separate opinion criticizing the federal law.

Puerto Rico's Slide

Then Sonia Sotomayor stepped in. Oral arguments before the Supreme Court rarely change the outcome of a case, yet Tuesday's session may turn out to be the exception. In a fascinating and unusual argument, Justice Sotomayor, who is herself of Puerto Rican descent, spoke by my count an astonishing 45 times. Sotomayor left no doubt that she was speaking as an advocate.

The interpretation of the law she favored would make the system fairer to Puerto Rico, allowing the commonwealth to create its own emergency bankruptcy measures outside federal law. But it depends on a highly doubtful reading of the statute, one that stretches credulity when read into the text. Ideally, Congress will hear what happened at the oral argument and pass one of the reform proposals it’s currently considering that would spare the court from having to decide the case.

Sotomayor walked Puerto Rico’s attorney, Christopher Landau, through his own argument with a precision that exceeded his own. She answered other justices’ hostile questions for him, better than he did. Then she dominated Matthew McGill, the lawyer for the creditors of Puerto Rico’s electrical utility, who are fighting the bankruptcy bid. In the second half of the argument, the other justices mostly stood by and let her go at him.

[Original Lurker]

Maybe.

IIRC, some 70% of the population is one at least one form of welfare.

[oblomov]

Maybe he holds some of the PR debt.

In which case, I’d ask:
Ideology aside, how could such an idiot be allowed to sit on the SCOTUS?