'Still tilting at windmills'

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor speaks to the books that inspired her, and the work that continues

Growing up in a tiny tenement in the Bronx, with a single working mother, a juvenile diabetes diagnosis at age 8, and a grim prognosis for what she was told would be a short life, US Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor began to read books as a way out. Decades later, she acknowledges that in those pages, she found more than a respite from her daily challenges; she discovered a roadmap to the people and places an immigrant's daughter might not otherwise have thought to explore.

"At a very early age, books were an escape from the unhappiness of my home," she told the audience of more than 700 people assembled at St. John's College on Wednesday evening for a Q&A with St. John's president, Mark Roosevelt, as part of the Carol J Worrell Annual Lecture Series on Literature. "It gave me a view of the world I did not have from the perch I lived in."

No one there traveled, except to Puerto Rico to see family, she said—her own parents immigrated from Puerto Rico during World War II, and she's a self-described "Newyorkrican." Even she didn't know where Yonkers, the next town over, was until she was in high school. What she found in books introduced her to territory far from that inhabited by those living around her. From them, she said, "I understood there was more I could dream to do and see."

That, she pointed out, was a product of books and not television.

Asked to list the three books that have meant the most to her, she named the Bible, which taught her to carefully examine and choose the kind of person she wants to be; Shakespeare, whose complete works live on a shelf in her office and to which she still turns for insights into human nature; and Don Quixote, as a totem of the spirit of the chase.

"I'm still tilting at windmills," she said. "I'm a little better than he is in that I understand they're windmills, but I do think there's a need to be idealistic. … I would rather live a life being hopeful than not, dreaming rather than giving up."

Though judicial code prohibits her from speaking directly to political issues, and the audience was told the rules for any questions they might ask prohibited current cases, politics and "the Donald," Sotomayor did make mention of a few of those windmills she might still see on her horizon. Namely, that as the court's reading of the US Constitution continues to evolve with society over time, they may revisit how they've interpreted the Bill of Rights prohibition on infringement of speech to include money spent on political campaigns.

Questions of privacy and intellectual property are still being debated as well, she said, acknowledging that the court can lag years, if not decades, behind the times on some of these issues.

Sotomayor joined the US Supreme Court in 2009, nominated by President Barack Obama. She came to the US Supreme Court with more federal judicial experience than any justice in 100 years, according to the May 2009 statement released from the White House press secretary announcing her nomination, and with more overall judicial experience than anyone in 70 years, having spent time as an assistant district attorney and Court of Appeals and district court judge in New York. Her memoir, My Beloved World, describes her journey to the Supreme Court and was called “an eloquent and affecting testament to the triumph of brains and hard work over circumstance, of a childhood dream realized through extraordinary will and dedication” by New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani. Roosevelt, St. John’s president, conceded he doesn’t usually like books like hers, preferring detective novels, but that Sotomayor’s memoir was an engaging read. 

As to what kept her going at such a high speed—propelled from Catholic school in New York to Princeton University, from which she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and Yale Law School, where she edited the Yale Law Journal—Sotomayor pointed to her diagnosis with juvenile diabetes at age 8, when she was told that her life would be plagued with illness and complications and that the toll the disease would take would likely result in her death by the age of 40. When she celebrated her 50th birthday (and she's now 61), she told her friends how she never expected to live to be this old.

That prognosis fueled her to make the most of every day, she said, to squeeze all that she could out of the days she did have. A student who enrolled in every extracurricular activity and worked every weekend became an adult who kept up that pace in her career, motivated by the feeling that she didn't have very long to live.

"I'm past that fear, but I'm not past the lesson it taught," she said.

None of us will accomplish everything we set out to achieve, she said, but "if you don't value that [failure] for what it teaches you, you're going to live in fear of it."

And that will mean either not trying or hiding in embarrassment from your mistakes, rather than learning from them.

She mentioned the times in her own life she fumbled—that first job interview in which she discovered she hadn't really considered the kinds of questions required and thus wasn't prepared. She wasn't hired for that position, and that mistake was one she has not repeated, she said.

Pursuing a better understanding of her own missteps and how to improve has often exposed her directly to the prejudices bracketing her life as often the only woman or the only Latina in her law school classroom or courtroom. Such was the case when, during a Yale Law School mock trial, she noticed a juror shaking his head every time she spoke. She asked him afterward what she'd done wrong—"I'm a student; I'm here to learn," she said. He tried to dismiss it, saying, "It's my own thing." But she pressed him. His answer, at last, was, "I don't like brash Jewish women."

"I actually sat there and thought, 'What do I say?'" Sotomayor recounted, "'I'm not Jewish?'"

In the end, she replied, "You're right. I can't do anything about that."

That conversation was sparked by a question from Roosevelt about a previous statement Sotomayor made that as someone working in a male-dominated field, she'd learned to argue like a man, and it served her well.

"Is that advice you'd give?" he asked.

"Oh gosh no," she said. "It works for me. … But I don't want everybody to be like me. That wouldn't be any fun."

There's a balance, she said, to be found between women learning to maneuver in the world, and men learning to make a little space for them.

"There's nothing wrong with a soft voice," she said of the often-heard concern from women. "But you do have to learn how to project so people can hear you. … Women have to learn how to project, just as young men have to learn to be respectful, not to cut people off."

Those female lawyers who do learn to develop an individual style, she said, she's seen be "deadly in court."

If there was any grumbling among the largely fawning audience, amid whom Sotomayor walked (to the great dismay of the US marshals trailing her), shaking hands and giving the occasional shoulder squeeze, it emerged during the Q&A session, which saw all four pre-approved questions from St. John's students come from men. They asked about her early work as a lawyer, whether a justice could serve now who had no prior judicial experience, the letter versus the spirit of the law, and whether our 227-year-old Constitution still represents our values. After the first two initial audience questions went to men as well, Sotomayor called on a woman, whose sole comment was to observe that only men had been invited to ask the associate justice questions.

"That's why I picked you," Sotomayor declared. "I always even it up."

Questions that followed, all of which came from women, saw her encouraging a fellow lawyer concerned that her mistakes might hurt someone to ask them questions and give them choices and have a discussion. She called on all attendees to engage with the political process she’s prohibited from speaking to by the judicial code. The final question came from a black female student, who asked what that singularity of experience—being the only woman or only woman of color in the roomhad done for Sotomayor. 

She pointed to a case that preceded her time on the Supreme Court, in which a family charged that a strip-search of their 13-year-old daughter at her school following accusations that she'd done drugs constituted an illegal search. Some Supreme Court justices compared the experience to changing in a locker room, to which Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg commented that clearly some of her colleagues didn't understand the sensitivity about her body a 13-year-old girl would be feeling.

"Did it change the decision? I don't know," she said. But no one wrote an opinion with that analogy in it.

Each of us has experiences that make us who we are, she said; there's no one thing that defines who that person has become. What matters is to talk about it and to listen.

"There are people who will perceive our life experiences as devaluing us," she said, speaking directly to the student who'd asked. "As long as we don't, it won't matter."

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