Harvard Law School professor panned Sotomayor

Barack Obama's legal mentor privately urged him not to appoint Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court in 2009, criticizing her intellect and warning that her style could "simply add to the firepower" of the court's conservative wing. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and currently a senior official in the Justice Department, made the critique of Sotomayor in a confidential May 4, 2009 letter shortly after Justice David Souter announced his plan to retire. Tribe said Sotomayor was "not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is, and her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire."