xxxx eight business cases. Although her decisions are filled with citations of the law and precedent, Sotomayor once pointed to 'powerful policy considerations' in allowing a lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard to go forward, and she worried about damage to U.S.-British relations in arguing that British subjects should have access to U.S. courts. Conservatives have criticized Sotomayor for saying in 2005 that 'the Court of Appeals is where policy is made. I know this is on tape, and I should never say that.' The White House has defended her, saying the remark was taken out of context. Sotomayor, appointed to the appeals court by President Bill Clinton, is a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan and a trial judge, and acquaintances say that background has helped shape her judicial style. She overturns lower courts at roughly the same rate as other Democratic appointees. Her writings are full of details from the trial record, especially in criminal matters, where she often meticulously analyzes witness testimony. When she reinstated a verdict against Ford in 2002 in the lawsuit of a woman who said her van suddenly accelerated without her touching the gas pedal, Sotomayor wrote that one witness's testimony 'requires two simultaneous malfunctions in the cruise control circuitry. The first is an open ground connection to the speed amplifier, resulting from a loose or broken wire.' Last year, in voting to overturn a firearms defendant's sentence, Sotomayor joined a Democratic appointee and a Republican in analyzing whether New York City's dense population puts bystanders at greater risk from gunfire than elsewhere. She wrote a separate dissent, acknowledging that the trial judge's opinion on the subject was 'detailed' but citing government reports and newspaper articles to argue it was 'insufficient' to support a sentence above the range recommended by federal guidelines. A Republican appointee who disagreed wrote that 'appellate courts are not factfinders. ... I do not understand it to be our role ... to engage in this kind of dissection of the empirical evidence cited by the district court. Nor is it to identify competing studies or news articles pointing in other directions.' In 2004, Sotomayor went beyond the facts established at trial in arguing that two teenage girls were illegally strip-searched at Connecticut juvenile detention facilities. Their lawsuit against the state was dismissed by a federal judge but reinstated by an all-Democratic 2nd Circuit panel, which said four of the strip searches at issue were unlawful but four others were legal. 