The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today that a West Virginia Supreme Court justice should have recused himself from a case that involved his biggest benefactor.

The case, Caperton et al. v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., Inc., concerned whether West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin should have been involved in a business case given that Massey's CEO, Don Blankenship, engineered massive financial contributions to Benjamin's election effort while the case was still heading to the West Virginia Supreme Court.

"We conclude that there is a serious risk of actual bias -- based on objective and reasonable perceptions -- when a person with a personal stake in a particular case had a significant and disproportionate influence in placing the judge on the case by raising funds or directing the judge's election campaign when the case was pending or imminent," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court. Kennedy was joined by the court's liberal bloc of justices: John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor delivered multiple speeches between 1994 and 2003 in which she suggested "a wise Latina woman" or "wise woman" judge might "reach a better conclusion" than a male judge.

Those speeches, released Thursday as part of Sotomayor's responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee's questionnaire, (to see Sotomayor's responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee click here and here) suggest her widely quoted 2001 speech in which she indicated a "wise Latina" judge might make a better decision was far from a single isolated instance.

A draft version of a October 2003 speech Sotomayor delivered at Seton Hall University stated, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion." That is identical to her October 2001 remarks at the University of California, Berkeley that have become the subject of intense criticism by Republican senators and prompted conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh to label her "racist."