Jeffrey Rosen, legal affairs editor for The New Republic, wrote a piece Monday morning headlined "The Case Against Sotomayor," a self-titled "indictment" of a woman many believe to be a leading candidate for nomination to the Supreme Court. Putting aside your views on whether Judge Sotomayor is the right person for the job -- personally, I don't know enough to form an opinion -- Rosen's article is a sorry excuse for reporting that does not even come close to respectable journalism. To the contrary, the piece is no more than a collection of anonymously cast aspersions, aspersions that will be distressingly familiar to many women or minorities who have worked their way through America's leading law schools and on to successful legal careers.

Relying exclusively on anonymous quotes from a series of former law clerks -- law clerks who never actually worked for Judge Sotomayor -- Rosen publishes a recognizable, if unsettling, thesis. To paraphrase: "The leading candidate for the Supreme Court is a Hispanic woman with too much attitude and not enough brains for the job." Not until the final paragraph of the article does Rosen acknowledge: "I haven't read enough of Sotomayor's opinions to have a confident sense of them." This despite the fact that the author is a law professor at George Washington Law School who, presumably, had the time to read some of Judge Sotomayor's work before publishing his piece. Rosen's lack of diligence, however, does not stop him from reporting that the "word on the street" is that Sotomayor is "not that smart," lacks "command of technical legal details," writes opinions that are "not especially clean or tight," and would be unable to muster the brain power "to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices."

I generally try not to get worked up over every piece of sloppy journalism I read, especially not over sensationalist articles seemingly more interested in drumming up web traffic than reporting credible facts. But Rosen's piece is outrageous and should not be allowed to stand as a legitimate "assessment" of Judge Sotomayor's record or capabilities. I don't have an opinion on Judge Sotomayor's candidacy for the Supreme Court because, like Professor Rosen, I am not familiar with her work. But I do have an opinion on purported journalists publishing thinly veiled smears of prominent Latino/a lawyers based entirely on anonymous "sources" who invariably claim Latinos are too loud, too hot headed, and far too stupid to be entrusted with the jobs we have, let alone more important ones.

I do not know Professor Rosen and do not suggest that he deliberately portrayed Judge Sotomayor as a stereotypical caricature of a Latina. I do believe, however, that his piece represents shoddy, irresponsible, and grossly negligent reporting of the worst kind -- reporting that has consequences and that ought not be left unanswered. Reasonable people can disagree as to whether Judge Sotomayor has the ideal combination of qualities one would look for in a Supreme Court Justice. But anyone who is going to criticize a summa cum laude Princeton graduate who went on to Yale Law School and has risen to become a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals as just too dumb to be on the Supreme Court better have much more to go on than vague and anonymous whisperings among random former law clerks. Far from an indictment of Judge Sotomayor, Rosen's piece is an indictment of The New Republic and of its author's journalistic integrity.

Andrew Manuel Crespo is a graduate of Harvard Law School. In 2007 he was elected the first Latino president of the Harvard Law Review.