July 15 (Bloomberg) -- Judge Sonia Sotomayor is portraying herself as a force for continuity with a reluctance to topple the established order even as she makes her case to become a barrier-breaking justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sotomayor, who would become the court’s first Hispanic, responded to Republican attacks yesterday by saying she would respect previous high court rulings and take a case-by-case approach on property rights, gun control and other constitutional issues.

A good judge “looks at the facts of each case, listens and understands the arguments of the parties and applies the law as the law commands,” she told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “It’s a refrain I keep repeating because that is my philosophy of judging -- applying the law to the facts at hand.”

Sotomayor resumed her testimony today, her third day on the stand at the confirmation hearing. She told senators that neither President Barack Obama nor anyone else in the White House had asked her about her views on abortion.

“I was asked no questions by anyone including the president about my views on any specific legal issue,” she said.

Republicans yesterday said her record suggests she would let her personal views influence her decisions as a justice. They pointed to speeches in which she suggested that the ethnicity and gender of judges might affect the quality of their decisions.

“That is not impartiality,” Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama said. He and other Republicans questioned rulings by Sotomayor on racial discrimination, property rights, guns and environmental regulation.

Settled Precedents

Sotomayor, Obama’s first high court nominee, answered by repeatedly invoking the principle that the court generally won’t disturb its settled precedents.

“There are circumstances in which a court should reexamine precedent and perhaps change its direction or perhaps reject it, but that should be done very, very cautiously,” Sotomayor said.

Sotomayor, 55, said she accepted an individual’s right to own guns under the Constitution’s Second Amendment, recognized for the first time last year in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision.

“I understand how important the right to bear arms is to many, many Americans,” she said, noting that she has a godchild in the National Rifle Association and friends who hunt.

Second Amendment

She declined to say how she would rule in the likely event that the high court considers whether the Second Amendment applies to the states, saying only that she would have an “open mind” on the question.

On the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, she joined two other judges in invoking an 1886 Supreme Court precedent and saying that the Second Amendment restricts only the federal government. The opinion said the high court should have “the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.”

The NRA said before the hearing it has “very serious concerns” about Sotomayor’s nomination. Yesterday, NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam called Sotomayor’s answers “evasive.”

Sotomayor said she would respect a landmark 2005 property rights ruling by the Supreme Court, while saying she understood “the concern that many citizens have expressed” about it.

Private Property Rights

The 5-4 decision said state and local governments have broad power to take over private property to make way for shopping malls, office parks and other development projects. The case centered on the Constitution’s takings clause, which requires government agencies to pay compensation when they seize private property “for public use.”

Sotomayor called the ruling “a complicated one about what constituted a public use.”

She said that Supreme Court rulings affirming abortion rights and those upholding restrictions on that right were both “settled law.”

Asked about affirmative action, Sotomayor endorsed the high court’s precedents and echoed retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s view that some day racial preferences will be a thing of the past.

“It is firmly my hope,” Sotomayor said, “that in 25 years race in our society won’t be needed to be considered in any situation.”

The high court has approved racial preferences in education to promote diversity while rejecting quotas.

Constitutional Interpretation

Throughout her testimony, Sotomayor gave no indication that she would embrace a sweeping theory of constitutional interpretation to rival Justice Antonin Scalia’s “originalist” approach, which focuses on the meaning of the words in the Constitution when they were written.

Asked whether she was an originalist, she answered, “I don’t use labels.”

“My sense is that Judge Sotomayor will be more of a workmanlike justice than a judicial philosopher,” said Brian Fitzpatrick, a former Scalia clerk who now teaches constitutional law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Sotomayor pointed to Benjamin Cardozo, rather than a fellow trailblazer like O’Connor or Thurgood Marshall, as a justice she admired. O’Connor was the first woman on the Supreme Court and Marshall was the first black.

Cardozo, who served on the high court from 1932 to 1938, showed “respect and deference to the legislative branch and to the other branches of government and their powers under the Constitution,” Sotomayor said.

Sotomayor distanced herself from then-Senator Obama’s 2005 statement that the toughest Supreme Court cases “can only be determined on the basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”

Sotomayor said she “wouldn’t approach the issue of judging the way the president does.”

She said, “Judges can’t rely on what’s in their heart.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 15, 2009 10:14 EDT