I’m worried about Pres. Obama’s pick for the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor. I’m worried she won’t follow her judge’s oath, or the Constitution.

I love her life story and respect her achievements. I even like her smile, and pronouncing her name is kind of fun. But her judicial philosophy is wrong.

Every judge takes an oath to be unbiased and to treat everyone equally, whether rich or poor, brown or white. This oath states that judges must “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich” and rule “impartially.” This goes back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (350 BC). A judge should rule with empathy or malice to none.

Yet, Sotomayor is a follower of “legal realism” — a 20th century judicial philosophy that says a judge should rule, not from the law and Constitution, but from life experience. This is the “empathy” Pres. Obama wanted, a kind of psycho-sexual-social consciousness. Sotomayor thinks that a judge’s individual sex and race should inform her decisions. Legal realism says the law is indeterminate, rather than constitutionally bedrocked until amended.

And empathy is the job of legislators, not judges. Lady Justice is blind-folded, for a reason: color blindness, objectivity, fairness. I worry that “empathy” is just code for favoritism and discrimination, like where Sotomayor ruled that minority fireman should be promoted over whites who did better on the test. I’m worried she’s a race-conscious affirmative actionist.

Sotomayor said Latinas make better judges than white men. Sounds racist to me. Granted, it’s just one quote and maybe critics are making too much of it. Perhaps she was just plugging the general idea of diversity. I, too, like diversity and empathy in my personal and social life, but it’s not a fair consideration for a judge.

Empathy is an emotion. Judges shouldn’t rule from emotion. If a judge gets personally involved in a case and becomes biased, she must step aside for a more neutral judge.

I worry Judge Sotomayor supports racial quotas and doesn’t support gun rights. I worry she doesn’t want America to be a meritocracy (where advancement and success comes by hard work and talent, rather than through favoritism, birth, ethnicity or class), but a redistributor of wealth and rights.

I worry she’ll consider extrajudicial things like identity politics and group think. I worry she won’t protect the Constitution and individual rights. I worry she’ll “interpret” the Constitution by infusing it with “progressive consciousness” rather than enforcing it as written.

Jeff E. Jared is a Kirkland resident and attorney.