At best she is being less than forthcoming. At worst, she is covering up unethical activity. Want to bet that no one looks at the activities of "Sotomayor & Associates"?

Yet as she moves through the confirmation process, Judge Sotomayor has explained very little about one facet of her legal life: Sotomayor & Associates, the solo law practice she ran out of her Brooklyn apartment for several years in the 1980s.

In her questionnaire, Judge Sotomayor says she was the “owner” of Sotomayor & Associates, which she described as a consulting business she operated on the side from 1983 to 1986. During this period, she also worked, first for the Manhattan district attorney’s office and then as a member of Pavia & Harcourt, a large firm in Manhattan.

As a single practitioner, she told the Senate, she had helped “family and friends in their real estate, business and estate planning decisions.” The only other thing she has said about the practice is that if her clients “required more substantial legal representation, I referred the matter to my firm, Pavia & Harcourt, or to others with appropriate expertise.”

It is generally seen as bordering on unethical to represent a solo practitioner under a name including "& Associates". In addition, her work during the time she was an ADA appears to fly in the face of stated prohibitions on outside work by attorneys for the DAs office. What's more, she can recall almost nothing about that period of her career, and cannot supply any documentation as to her clients and earnings during that period.

This from the nominee of the most transparent administration in US history. Seems to me that there needs to be close scrutiny of this period of the judge's professional career -- and that the lack of openness is legitimate grounds for rejecting her nomination.