Of making many books, there is no end.

Ecclesiastes, that master of the mid-life crisis, said that. He might as well have been speaking of Judge Sonia Sotomayor and the cottage industry she has spawned. Many studies have been produced of her judicial work; here are some recent interesting ones

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School is out with a comprehensive examination of 1,194 cases from the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. The study, conducted by a team of researchers and authored by Monica Youn, is described thusly:

"Using measures for testing judicial activism and deference developed by academics in recent years, the Center analyzed Judge Sotomayor's decisionmaking and compared her record to that of her colleagues on the Second Circuit. We looked at various measures of the relative deference or "activism" of a judge's action in a particular case."

The takeaway observation:

"Judge Sotomayor has been in agreement with her colleagues more often than most - 94% of her constitutional decisions have been unanimous. She has voted with the majority in 98.2% of constitutional cases."

An equally interesting study is out from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, where researchers examined Sotomayor's six years as a trial-level district judge. Well worth a look, this analysis shows Sotomayor was more likely than her colleagues to send a convicted individual to prison. For white collar criminals, the study found:

"Judge Sotomayor's colleagues sent 43% to prison, with only one out of three of the total receiving a sentence of six months or longer. Judge Sotomayor, in contrast, handed out prison time more often. In her case, a bit more than half (52%) were given some prison time and nearly half (48%) -- rather than one-third (34%) -- were given a prison sentence of 6 months or more."