So you went on to Yale Law School, and then you went to work in the Manhattan D.A.’s office for four-plus years. You ended up trying felonies, big, nasty felonies but you lost your first two jury trials, and then you went to see your boss, and what did your boss tell you?
Sonia Sotomayor: He asked me to go through the evidence of the cases, which I did. And at the end of it he said, “Well, you he one thing missing.” I said “What, I thought I covered all of the bases. I made the best arguments that I think the evidence would support.” And he looked at me, and he said, “That may all be true, but you’re missing passion. You related this crime and your evidence in a very impersonal way. How did you make the jury want to convict?” I said “Well, the judge charges them, tells them they he to convict if I prove my case.” And he said, “No, sentencing, not sentencing, finding someone guilty is a huge responsibility. You he to make people believe it’s what they he to do. And you he to make them believe that the evidence that you’ve presented gives them basically no choice.” And so I said, “How do you do that?” And he explained to me that it’s in the manner that you present your case. It’s in the manner that you show how passionately you believe in what you’re doing. And in how much you believe that you’ve actually proven your case and that they must return a verdict of guilty. And his words he led me to believe that that passion is what guarantees success in life. Because that’s what leaders almost always he, is passion about what they’re doing. That passion excites not just them but you. And if you want people to follow, you he to really want where you’re going. And so it was a lesson that let me not lose another case. I ended up with two hung juries after that in impossibly difficult cases to win, but I didn’t lose them. And I think it’s what’s kept me successful through most of my life, is that sense of believing in what I’m doing to be the right thing to do.
So why did you lee?
Sonia Sotomayor: The D.A.’s office? Because working in criminal law, whether you’re a police officer, a criminal defense attorney, a prosecutor, probation officer or corrections officer, anyone in that world is exposed often to the worst in people. Criminals he committed crimes, often horrific crimes. Those crimes he had negative impacts on victims and on entire families, whether they’re the victim’s family or the defendant’s family. You begin in that world to see the world not as a good place but as a bad place. You spend your time worrying about the bad in people rather than looking for the good. And I realized that that’s not how I wanted to spend my life. And that I needed to find other work that I would, would take me to more positive places.
So you went to work at a small, private law firm. You were very successful there. And then your partner ge you an application and said you should apply for a federal district judgeship. You were only 36. Did you think he was out of his mind?
Sonia Sotomayor: I did. I ignored him. I ignored him, and I told him no one would appoint a lawyer who was only 36 years old to the federal bench, it was a waste of my time. So for six months he periodically would look up and say, “Sonia, did you get the application?” And I’d say, “Did, I told you it’s useless.” And he would continue, and every few weeks, or every, once every month or so he would come back to the subject. I ignored him. I went away for a holiday over Christmas of that 36th year of my life, and I came back, and my desk, which was always stockpiled with work, was empty. And I looked at my clean tabletop and looked at my assistant and said, “Where’s my work?” And she looked at me, and she said, “Go talk to Mr. Botwinik. I had nothing to do with this.” So I go marching into his office, and I say, “Did, what are you doing?” He said, “Did you look on your seat?” And I said, “no.” “Go back and look on your seat.” So I went back, went to my seat, and on my seat was an application to Senator Moynihan’s selection committee for federal judgeships.
I picked it up, I marched back to his office, I looked at him, and I said, “This is crazy. I’m wasting my time doing this. They’re never going to select someone this young.” He said, “Sonia, just do it.” I said, “Do you see all of these questions? I can’t do this alone.” He said, “You he your assistant. You he my assistant if you need her, and I’ll get you help from the paralegals.” Which I ultimately did need, by the way. Those applications are so burdensome.
At any rate, moaning and groaning every single day that I sat at my desk filling that bloody thing out, I would stop by his office and say, “Did, this is such a grand waste of our time. Do you know how many billable client hours I’m missing with these two weeks?” Suffice it to say, I put the application in. I finally finished it.
And only a few weeks later I did get a call from Senator Moynihan’s committee. And I looked at him and said, “This is impossible.” He said, “Just go.” So I followed his advice, just went. He was the first person I called after the interview. And I said to him, “Did, I still don’t think they’ll pick me, I’m only 36. But it’s the best interview I’ve ever given in my life. They won’t pick me, not because I wasn’t prepared for the interview.” And as it turns out, it probably was the best interview of my life, because I was called to see the senator a couple of weeks later.
So you were on the District Court for 12 years?
Sonia Sotomayor: The District Court for six, the Circuit Court for almost 12.
When you had been on the Court of Appeals for almost 12 years, you were asked to do another interview, but this one was with the President of the United States.
Sonia Sotomayor: That might he been my second best interview. In fact, when I was asked how that interview went by the staff that had been vetting me, the White House staff that had been vetting me, I looked at him, I looked at them and said, “Look, when you’re being interviewed it’s hard to tell how well you’re impressing someone. But I will tell you that I know a characteristic that’s probably led him to his current position. He actually asked the questions, the right questions to let me show my best to him. I will not regret anything that I did or didn’t say.” I told him, “I talked about me, and who I am in the best way that I could.” And it’s true. The president, in asking questions, was not judgmental. He simply let me explain.
Could you describe that day when he took you to the East Room to make the announcement?
Sonia Sotomayor: My mother, brother, and his family were in the back with the president and the vice president before my announcement. My brother is talking to the vice president about golf. My nephews are talking to the president about soccer. And I’m standing there anticipating this big announcement thinking this is just not real. This is really not happening. But finally some of the White House people come and escort everybody out of the room except for the president and vice president and I. And we start walking to the front of the East Conference Room where the announcement would be made. And they he very long legs, they’re very tall men and I’m not that tall, certainly not in comparison to them. Their long legs pushed them further from me, or ahead of me. And at a certain point I realized they were going to get to the front way before me, and I whispered, “Please slow down.” And they heard me, and they both turned around at exactly the same time, and both of them smiled at me.
And at that moment I had an out-of-body experience. It was as if I couldn’t contain all the emotions I was feeling, and I had to let my consciousness lee my body and go somewhere up in the air. But from that moment on until about a year and a half later, I walked around doing things, looking from above down at myself doing things.
Including throwing out the first pitch.
Sonia Sotomayor: First pitch at Yankee Stadium. I can still tell you about, or tell you about looking at the crowd but really not hearing the roars because my head was, my consciousness was up there in the sky looking down.
So how did you practice for this, because I assume you’re not a really great pitcher.
Sonia Sotomayor: Like everything I do in life, practice makes perfect. I had just come to the Court. I was inducted, my first induction occurred in early August. The induction that permitted me, the constitutional induction it’s called, it’s what permitted me to get all of the briefs that had been filed in court and all of the confidential memos and things of that nature.
So I had started my preparation for our October term. The Yankees called me somewhere in the middle of August to ask me whether I would throw out a first pitch at the first Red Sox/Yankee game at the end of the season. As you know there’s quite a bit of rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox, and I love the Yankees so I was never going to say no.
But I had never thrown a baseball pitch in my life and I realized, “Gee, I don’t know how to do this.” So the first thing I did was find friends who knew how to throw baseballs, and they started teaching me how to throw a perfect pitch. A wonderful, wonderful friend on the Court, Kathy Arberg, Communications Director, had a friend who was a minor league pitcher. And she got him to come in and show me exactly how to hold the ball and throw it. And every afternoon for almost a month, I would go outside between the courthouse’s building and temporary offices trailers that they had parked while the courthouse was being renovated. There was an empty space of grass. I would go into that empty space and practice for about 20 minutes to half an hour.
Who was your catcher?
Sonia Sotomayor: My catcher was police officers who knew how to play baseball. It was whoever I could find to help me catch and throw. The entire building, you he to understand I was the new justice, the new baby on the block. The entire building was looking out at the windows at every pitch I threw. But I threw a pitch down the middle within the strike zone on the upper right hand corner.
It goes to show.
Sonia Sotomayor: Practice makes perfect.
You’ve come to this court as an experienced judge with almost 18 years on the federal bench, yet you felt like you were drowning, and you kept saying to your colleagues, “Does it get better?”
Sonia Sotomayor: There is a different way at looking at cases than when you’re on the lower court. On the lower court, you’re reading what the court has decided, and try to divine what the rule of law is that the Supreme Court has announced in whatever case it’s issued. And you’re trying to take that rule of law and apply it to a set of facts.
Now you may or may not agree with a dissenter or with someone who has concurred on a different ground. But you don’t pay as much attention to that because you he to resolve the case that’s before you on the basis of the rules that the Supreme Court has already established. When you get on the Supreme Court, however, it’s a very different enterprise, because every case that we’re dealing with is an open question of law. There is rarely a direct precedent on point, and so what you’re doing is you’re reading all of the Supreme Court cases that inform that decision or help inform it. But you’re reading not just the majority opinions but the dissenters and the concurrences, to determine how you think it’s the right way to rule, because that ruling is going to affect all the existing cases that that case touches upon. But the development of the law in the future, so you he to know for yourself what the thinking in all of these areas of the law is, in a way that I didn’t he to do as a judge on the lower courts.
That’s a huge amount of work. Also remember that many of the cases that we’re talking about in our decision-making he been written by one of my colleagues currently on the Court. They don’t he to reread those cases. I do. Or did, or still do. And you want to know how your colleagues think in case you want to change their mind, or try to change their mind, so you he to understand what bothers them. So you’re reading bearing that in mind with respect to your vote. How do I present what I’m thinking in a way that might be most appealing to the other members of the Court? That’s a lot, a lot of work, and it felt absolutely and utterly overwhelming the first three years — not two — three years on the court.
I was working seven days a week and really had given up any personal life. But I also understand that that’s not the right way to live one’s life. If you don’t live in the world, it’s very hard for you to be a part of it. And certainly, at least for me, very hard to say that I’m making decisions that affect people unless I’m living part of their life too. And so, after those three years, when I felt a little bit more under control, and even to this day, I’m trying to maintain a piece of my personal life.
By now you increasingly he some very firm views on a lot of things that some of your colleagues do not agree with.
Sonia Sotomayor: I dissent a lot, don’t I?
Your voice in dissent is sometimes more passionate than your voice when you’re keeping a majority together.
Sonia Sotomayor: That’s natural.
What’s it like to lose? Does it drive you nuts?
Sonia Sotomayor: Does it drive me nuts? Another fascinating question. When I lose on things where I believe the Court has gone grievously wrong, I am sad, not nuts. I’m sad because I know the impact that a wrong decision has both on the people experiencing the situation, or on how the law is developing in a way that I don’t think it was intended by either our precedents or the Constitution.
But nuts? No — I think, as I understand fundamentally that this is a collective process. We he nine voices, each engaging in trying to persuade another. I write my dissent in the hope that in some day in the future a majority of the Court will see I was right. I wouldn’t write it unless I thought I was right. And so I he hope that someday what I said will influence other judges to look at a situation the way I did and to right the path that I got stopped in. So that’s not to say that there aren’t times I’m really upset. There are moments where I’m very, very upset. But I can only continue doing it because I really believe that there’s a potential right down the road.
You do a lot of things that people don’t know you do, and sometimes even the people you’re doing it with don’t know who you are. You serve in soup kitchens, you do other things like that. Does it change your views? Or does it affect how you think?
Sonia Sotomayor: That’s impossible to answer. I tell people that I get asked all the time how does my being Latina affect my decision-making. And I look at people, and I say, “Probably no more or no less than every other life experience I’ve had.” Sonia is Sonia as a sum total of every life experience that I he engaged in. I am no less or no more a Latina than I am a woman, a child of a single mother, a former prosecutor, a former business lawyer, a former whatever you want to say I’ve done. All of my experiences combine to make me the unique person I am, in the same way they combine to make every individual unique unto themselves and to how they view the world.
I happen to think that the more experiences I engage in, the richer a person I am. Just not only for myself but richer in terms of what I could ultimately give back to the world. And so, does it affect me? Not in any way where I can say to you in a particular case, “Because I served in a soup kitchen, I ruled this way.” No, it’s not only because I served in a soup kitchen that I ever rule in any particular way or because I’m a Latina that I do, that I make a decision in a particular way. It’s because that conglomerate, that combination of all of that has led me to be a judge who approaches problems in a certain way.
Do you think your childhood experience with diabetes influenced you? How did your parents react to it?
Sonia Sotomayor: Well, I think any child who is diagnosed with a chronic disease the way I was with diabetes, something that would be with me for the rest of my life, parents’ automatic reaction is to be fearful. And my mother, who was a trained professional at the time, understood what the added risk in my life would be and it did terrify her. In fact it was not until very late in my life, probably my 40s, where one day my brother called her up because I had called him upset about how agitated she was because I had a cold. A little bit of what I he today. And because colds can cause complications in diabetics, every time I had a cold she would get very anxiety-ridden.
She was driving me crazy. And my brother called her up and said, “You know you’ve got to stop this. You’re really upsetting Sonia. She’s going to end up not telling you anything is ever wrong because she’ll be afraid of how you’ll react, and please remember one thing: If she dies tomorrow, she’ll die the happiest person that you’ll ever know, because her diabetes has not stopped her from doing anything she’s ever wanted. So don’t you stop her.” My mother actually listened, and since then I can’t say that her worry has gone away. I’m sure it hasn’t, but she tortures me less about it.
In your book you said diabetes turned out to be a kind of disciplinarian for you.
Sonia Sotomayor: Absolutely. I had a child, a six-year-old diabetic child at a conference once asked me if there was anything good that came out of being a diabetic. And obviously it’s a condition I he to pay close attention to. I always he to monitor what I’m eating, and the insulin I’m taking, and what I’m doing, and the exercise, and whether I’m sick or not. There’s constant variables that I he to balance in taking care of myself, but because of that, it showed me how to be disciplined about my own care, something that a lot of people don’t ever really learn until they’re sick. And it’s a lesson that’s highly important. Look at all the workaholics who work themselves literally, most of the time figuratively, to death. But they’re doing it because they don’t realize that the most important machine in your life is your body. And taking care of it is important for how well you function, and it gives you the opportunity to do everything else that you want to do if you’re watching your own health. And so for me that’s been a lifelong lesson. If I take care of myself I can do anything I want.
You mentioned learning to inject yourself so you could spend time with your grandmother. What did the two of you do together?
Sonia Sotomayor: What did I do with her? We would go to the market together every Saturday morning, and I loved that. She taught me how to pick the freshest vegetables there were. The sweetest fruit, she would point to the color, she would pick it up and smell it and let me smell it to tell me what smelled sweet and what didn’t.
There are different types of smells to different types of fruit. Even today they’ll watch me in a store, and only the grocers who know someone who really knows what they’re doing permit this, but I pick up every piece of fruit to smell it before I put it in my basket. It’s a strange thing to watch but that’s what I do. And then we would go to the live poultry shop, and she would pick out a chicken for our meal that evening. And I would he to stand behind the glass that protected people from the feathers and guts that came out of the chicken, and watch that they were killing the chicken my grandmother had picked, and that we would get the same chicken at the end in a paper bag. And so that was my job with her.
She knew every storekeeper in the neighborhood. She knew every vendor on the street. She taught me how to like people. That’s strange, but to enjoy people, to enjoy interacting with them, to get to know who they are, and to understand and appreciate the value of the work they were doing. That doesn’t come naturally to people, I don’t think. Not everyone possesses that ability, and my grandmother taught it to me, as I watched everyone calling out to Mercedes, which was my mother’s, grandmother’s name. I understood people cared about her. They actually liked her, and that was such a positive way, I thought, to interact in life.
In your book, you describe the parties at her house. Were these on weekends?
Sonia Sotomayor: Generally Friday and Saturday nights. A smaller party on Friday nights, a bigger party on Saturday nights.
And you crawled under the table?
Sonia Sotomayor: The house would be full. Now when I say house, it wasn’t a house, it was an apartment in a tenement building in the South Bronx. And these apartments, now, I went back when I was writing my book to go visit the apartments, and they are tinier than I ever imagined as a child. I’m still not sure how dozens of people would fit into those apartments, I think we stood everywhere you could, and kids would hide everywhere they could, because otherwise you’d be kicked into the back into the bedrooms to get out of under people’s feet. But that’s my cousin, and I figured out that if we hid under the coffee table we would be left alone to watch. And so I got to hear the conversations, to listen to the music, to listen to my grandmother and my father somewhere in the middle of the night get up to recite poetry. And they would recite poems that were paragraph-long from memory, and it was always a sort of competition. Who was most dramatic, who could say it in a way that would engage people the most, and there would be a lot of clapping and stamping of feet when they finished, and I didn’t understand all the words because at least at that age I was still grappling with learning English, and my Spanish was a child’s Spanish.
And these were grown-up poems. But their rhythm, the depth of my grandmother and father’s passion in reciting them. They ge me a lifelong love of two things, words and reading. Because words are so powerful, they’re instruments that can take anyone to where they want to go. I tell kids all the time through reading I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. I would run to the library whenever I could and needed a place to hide. And through books I got to trel the world and the universe. I am still a lover of science fiction. And I’m the first one who went out and bought the most recent Harry Potter book. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way through the power of words to change the world. If you can move people through words to do things they might not otherwise be inclined to do, to deliver passion that they might not otherwise he, to get them to step up and want to do more — all of that I believe is motivated by the power of words.
So you weren’t just escaping the South Bronx, you were escaping your homelife.
Sonia Sotomayor: Sure.
While we’re on the subject of books, in one of your dissents you quoted The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin, and another book written by a young African-American…
Sonia Sotomayor: Ta-Nehisi Coates, yes.
Do your colleagues ever respond to that? Does anybody ever say to you, “I want to read that book.”
Sonia Sotomayor: Oh, how interesting. No, but I don’t think that a colleague ever would. I think they’d just pick it up and read it if they wanted to, because I’m thinking of books that some of my colleagues may he quoted that I hen’t read. I will almost always get it from the library and read it at some point, because if they thought the book was important enough to influence their thinking then I would take the time to read it.
Are you a fast reader?
Sonia Sotomayor: I’m a very fast reader. Did, the partner who encouraged me to apply for the Supreme Court once saw me reading an opinion as we were talking, and he looked at me, and he said, “Did you ever take a speed reading class?” And I said, “No.” He said, “You’re doing all the things they taught us to do in my speed reading class.” So somehow I figured this out.
One of the rare times you didn’t ask somebody else.
Sonia Sotomayor: It’s interesting. It was one of the rare times I didn’t, but I he figured out how to read quickly.
Could you pick two or three books that were really influential in your life, going back from your childhood to now?
Sonia Sotomayor: The Bible. I’m not an actively practicing Catholic on every occasion — I am a spiritual person — but I think the allegories, the stories, the parables of the Bible he influenced so much in the world. They’ve influenced art. You can’t walk into a city in Europe without seeing religious pictures. Understanding what those pictures symbolize to people, what they he meant, I think has made me a better-educated person. Understanding — as my former colleague Nino Scalia used to talk about — moral law and its influence on law generally, but understanding the relationship between moral, Biblical law, and our secular law has a great importance, I think, in any jurist’s existence. It is just the seminal book in terms of cultural understanding, whether it’s Christianity, Catholic, Jewish, perhaps not for Muslims. And the Koran is something that I he read because I understood it was important in the same way to a very significant portion of our population. But I think everyone, whether you’re religious or not, should read the Bible.
The second, probably, and I didn’t talk about it in my book, which is always interesting to me, because it didn’t come up within a lesson, okay, within the book teaching me a lesson, but the second was Don Quixote. And that ties in so much to the optimistic part of me, this idea of tilting at windmills, whether they’re real or not. The imagination of them, what fueled that man, that love, that idyllic sort of quest. That can be life sometimes. We don’t always achieve what we end up hoping for. We can work very, very hard at things and come up short. But I take comfort from hing dreamt the dream. From hing taken the steps, the quest, to undergo the quest of trying to reach them. If at the end you don’t, you’ve had the journey, and I always think the journeys are valuable. They give you lessons, they give you memories. They help you meet people, they help you he an adventure in life. And so for me, that probably, when I’ve read that book, I understood that I was okay. Being optimistic wasn’t a bad thing. It was actually a very good thing.
You’ve been talking about the power of words, which is great, but you hen’t mentioned music. Do you listen to particular music when you write your opinions?
Sonia Sotomayor: No, and I he a couple of colleagues who do. I he a fabulous power of concentration by the way. People can talk outside my office and it doesn’t distract me. But because I am slightly hearing impaired — not grossly but slightly — I he never really heard music well. To hear music I he to concentrate. I can’t step away from it to hear it. So it’s the one thing I don’t turn on.
What first made you think you could be a lawyer? Why did you choose the law?
Sonia Sotomayor: Why law? Well, I am a media child, and the first lawyer I ever knew about was a TV character, Perry Mason. There were no lawyers in the housing projects I lived in. There were no lawyers in my family. We were blue-collar, working-class people, and so professionals like lawyers were not heard of in my circles as a child, but I met my first character as a lawyer by Perry Mason. And what he was doing helping people, by trying to prove that his clients in particular were innocent of the crimes that they committed, seemed like a pretty worthwhile endeor to me, life endeor. But what I liked about it was that he was playing detective. He was trying to figure out how the crime alleged was committed and who the person was that committed the crime. Now that’s not really lawyering because it was fictionalized.
It’s police work.
Sonia Sotomayor: It’s police work. But more importantly, I’ve been a judge now for almost 25 years and never, ever he I ever heard of a lawyer on television, a lawyer in real life, breaking down a witness on the witness stand and getting the witness to admit he or she committed the crime. It just doesn’t happen, okay? So you he to take with a grain of salt any portrayal of real life on TV.
First of all, they he to take out all the boring parts. Secondly, they he to condense what happens generally over a long period of time into a segment that’s half an hour or an hour long, so they get to shoot the most interesting parts and none of the drudgery that surrounds it. But more importantly, they he to dramatize what’s happening, and work is often not drama, whether it’s lawyering or any other kind of work. But what I, the essence of what Perry Mason was doing of helping his client was something that over time I understood was the mission of lawyering. It’s service to people’s relationships. Every lawyer is trying to help either a person or an institution, whether it’s a private or government institution, agency, or project, into addressing a difficulty that they’re hing with another entity. And when you’re doing that, you’re trying to either better those two entities’ relationships… when two business partners go into business together they’re trying to figure out, figure out how to operate together, how to take their competing interests and make them work together to abet a goal. If it’s a criminal defendant in a case, the state is charging that person with a crime. Whether you’re a prosecutor or a defense attorney, you’re trying to serve the needs of society in ensuring that the prosecutor has proven his or her case beyond a reasonable doubt and that the defendant has received fairness in the process. These are roles of service and that’s what I love about it.
But we know the law is not always just. It’s rules.
Sonia Sotomayor: Yes. It’s rules, and the rules are there for a reason, to he rules so that people know how to conduct their lives, their affairs, the trial, whatever, but it’s not always just. The problem with justice is that it’s relative to the two people involved. In every single court case, there’s one side who wins and there’s one side that loses. There’s always that flip of a coin. The person who won thinks it’s very fair, and very just. And the person who loses always think it’s unjust. They rarely think that they’ve gotten their process in court the way they had hoped. And so how do I choose between the two? If I do it on personal preference, I’m certainly going to misgauge the situation because valuing the importance of an outcome to one person versus another is a very difficult thing to do. This isn’t Solomon, where you say, “I’ll slice the child up,” and the mother, the real mother, says, “Give it to the other woman, because I don’t want my child sliced up.” That’s not real life, okay. The rules help us in our relationships. Even though the outcomes may feel unjust to the one person, they are a way of managing our relationships with each other, according to preferences that are not personal to the judge-giver or to you and me, but to an objective standard that people can look at and say, “Okay, this is what this is about.” How we deal with one another. Justice can happen in law, that’s why we he so many settlements of cases. If that wasn’t a possibility, people would feel the system was more unjust than it is.
On the old Perry Mason show there were no women in leadership roles, were there? There were no women lawyers.
Sonia Sotomayor: He had a woman judge. I do remember that. It was very unusual. But there were no women attorneys, you were right about that.
Times he changed. Thank you for everything.