Washington Is Home (for Now at Least), but Sotomayor Stays True to New York
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Justice Sonia Sotomayor visiting the Bronx housing project where she grew up.
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: January 13, 2013
WASHINGTON — Justice Sonia Sotomayor
is a proud daughter of New York City, and her adjustment to life in the
nation’s capital has been rocky. Do not get her started, for instance,
on ordering takeout.
Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir
Bill Kostroun/Associated Press
Justice Sotomayor was escorted by Jorge Posada, the
catcher for the Yankees, to throw the ceremonial first pitch at a game
in 2009. Her memoir comes out this week.
“I go to New York, I order food, it’s at my door in 10 to 15 minutes. O.K.?” she said in an interview in her Supreme Court chambers. In Washington, she said, “there isn’t a place I call where it doesn’t take 45 minutes.”
“And then getting the food delivered to the Supreme Court? They’ve got
to stop at security, security has to call you, you’ve got to go
downstairs. By the time you get downstairs you may add another 15
minutes to the 45 minutes. And the food is ice-cold.”
There are four justices from New York City these days, each representing
a different borough, and it sometimes seems that the court speaks with a
New York accent.
Justice Sotomayor, who grew up in the Bronx, recalled getting to know
Justice Antonin Scalia, who is from Queens and whose friends call him
Nino.
“One day Nino looked at me and said: ‘You’re a real New Yorker. I love
you. You take as well you give,’ ” she said with a big laugh. “And I
understood. You know, we’re just out there and up front and fun.”
She mentioned a second colleague, Justice Elena Kagan. “I dare say Elena
has a little bit of that.” Justice Kagan is from Manhattan, and Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is more reserved, is from Brooklyn.
“The boroughs are different,” Justice Sotomayor said, “and so are we.”
The occasion for the chat was the publication of Justice Sotomayor’s memoir, “My Beloved World,” this week. It is steeped in vivid memories of New York City, and it is an exceptionally frank account of the challenges that she faced during her ascent from a public housing project to the court’s marble palace on First Street.
Justice Sotomayor turns out to be a writer of depth and literary flair, a
surprise to readers of her judicial prose. (“I am a lawyer’s judge,”
she said on hearing the observation. “I write very technically.”)
Her chambers are sleek, modern, filled with light and bursting with
pottery, art and mementos. There are photographs of her relatives, a
group portrait of the four women ever to serve on the Supreme Court and
one of Justice Sotomayor with President Obama, who appointed her in 2009.
In a corner, there is a bag overflowing with characters from “Sesame
Street,” where she has been known to dispense advice. (“Pretending to be
a princess is fun, but it is definitely not a career,” she said in an appearance on the show in November,
offering alternatives: “You can go to school and train to be a teacher,
a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer and even a scientist.”)
And there is a sign of the sort you might find in the novelty section of
a gift shop: “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”
Justice Sotomayor’s book ends in 1992 with her appointment to Federal
District Court in Manhattan. There are only stray references in the
memoir to her service there, on the United States Court of Appeals for
the Second Circuit in New York, where she served from 1998 to 2009, and
on the Supreme Court.
But her life story, which includes chapters at Princeton, Yale Law
School, the Manhattan district attorney’s office and private practice as
a civil litigator, illuminates her judicial work.
She acknowledged that she entered the Ivy League through “a special
door” and that her adjustment was rough. “I felt like an alien landing
in a different universe,” she said of her arrival at Princeton.
Her childhood was so urban that she was “known to confuse cows for horses.”
“I didn’t know what a cricket sounded like,” she said.
She was part of a vanguard not always welcomed by the old order. In the
book, she recalled letters in The Daily Princetonian “lamenting the
presence on campus of ‘affirmative action students,’ each of whom had
presumably displaced a far more deserving affluent white male and could
rightly be expected to crash into the gutter built of her own
unrealistic aspirations.”
“There were vultures circling, ready to dive when we stumbled,” she wrote.
She did not stumble. On graduating, she was awarded the Pyne Prize, the
university’s highest undergraduate award, presented for a combination of
academic success and extracurricular work.
Asked if the programs from which she benefited are still needed, she was
initially vague, perhaps as a consequence of a pending case about the
constitutionality of the University of Texas’s affirmative action plan.
“We have to look and ensure that we’re paying attention to what we’re
doing,” she said, so “that we don’t reflexively institute processes and
procedures that exclude people without thought.”
Her bottom line, though, was clear.
“We’ve got a way to go still,” she said. “I mean, clearly, we do.”
After her second year at law school, Justice Sotomayor spent a summer working at a prominent New York City law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
The vast majority of summer associates at big law firms in those days
received offers for full-time jobs, but she did not. She called the
experience “a kick in the teeth.”
Asked why she chose to discuss the matter, she said: “If I write a book
where all I’ve ever experienced is success, people won’t take a positive
lesson from it. In being candid, I have to own up to my own failures,
both in my marriage and in my work environment.” (She married Kevin
Noonan, now a biologist and patent lawyer, after graduating from
Princeton in 1976. They divorced in 1983.)
Justice Sotomayor’s affiliations on the Supreme Court create a complex
pattern. She is part of the court’s four-member liberal wing, one of its
three women, one of its three Yale Law graduates and one of its four
New Yorkers. She is also one of its six Catholics.
But she said her experience with Catholic education, at Blessed
Sacrament School and Cardinal Spellman High School, was mixed. “It was a
different time and a different generation that believed love was
discipline,” she said. “Nuns and priests, like every other human being,
are products of their environments. I was alien to the nuns and priests,
too, because none of them were minorities.”
These days, she said, her faith is not entirely conventional.
“I am a very spiritual person,” she said, though “maybe not
traditionally religious in terms of Sunday Mass every week, that sort of
thing.”
“The trappings are not important to me,” she said, “but, yes, I do
believe in God. And, yes, I do believe in the commandments. And, yes, I
do believe in their message of ‘thou shalt not kill,’ ‘thou shalt not
steal’ and the rest of it.”
Justice Sotomayor said she started to make her peace with life in
Washington after “eight months of grieving.” She recalled a morning
drive down Rock Creek Parkway that allowed her to see the city fresh.
“I thought to myself, ‘This is a really beautiful city,’ ” she said.
“It’s a very different life than New York. The pace is really different,
and for the breakneck speed at which you live in New York, this could
be a little slow at times.”
She has moved to a scruffy part of town, near U Street in Northwest Washington.
“It has a touch of the East Village in it,” she said. “I picked it
because it’s mixed. I walk out and I see all kinds of people, which is
the environment I grew up in and the environment I love.”
In her book, she confesses that she does not always observe the letter
of the law. “I’m a New Yorker,” she wrote, “and I jaywalk with the best
of them.”
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