Last June, at her own hearings, Sonia Sotomayor described her vision of a good judge as someone "who looks at the facts of each case, listens and understands the arguments of the parties, and applies the law to the facts at hand."
The complexity of this matter is suggested by Justice Sotomayor's concurrence to a unanimous opinion handed down today involving a federal statute in which she noted:
Subjecting EAJA fee awards to administrative offset for a litigant’s debts will unquestionably make it more difficult for persons of limited means to find attorneys to represent them.
The concurrence notes that the text and court precedents compelled the result all the same, but it is unclear that Congress actually thought about the problem when writing the law involved, in fact, the result goes "undermines the estimable aim" of the law in question. Sotomayor (joined with two others) wrote separately to flag the problem, since Congress "has just cause to clarify beyond debate." It was her first concurring opinion.
If the text and precedent wasn't so clear, would this result in the opinion possibly going the other way? Is the right to have an attorney to protect your rights and interests something that the courts in particular would worry more about in close cases? How much of this is merely "facts" of the case as compared to more of an at least somewhat subjective judgment call, in part based on your overall judicial philosophy (e.g., Scalia's focus on text alone is not a patently obvious path to take, as shown by his usual partners on the Court not always agreeing with him on the point*).
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* This suggests that lines sometimes are not so easily made, a truly strange bedfellows line-up.