On October 7, 2018, as part of the Academy’s 2018 Induction weekend, Sonia Sotomayor (Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States) participated in a conversation with David M. Rubenstein (Co-Founder and Co-Executive Chairman of The Carlyle Group). The program, which served as the Academy’s 2072nd Stated Meeting, was the second Annual David M. Rubenstein Lecture. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
For those who might have been buried under a rock for the last twenty years, let me give you a brief summary of Justice Sotomayor’s background. She was born and raised in the Bronx to immigrant parents from Puerto Rico. She went to Cardinal Spellman High School, where she did quite well, getting into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. How many of us here today got into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton?
She chose Princeton, graduated summa cum laude, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was the co-winner of the Pyne Prize, which is given to the most outstanding undergraduate student. She then went to Yale Law School, edited the Yale Law Journal, and chose not to clerk but to become a prosecutor. She served with Robert Morgenthau in the New York County prosecutor’s office. After five years, she went into private practice in New York.
At the age of thirty-six, she filled out an application to serve on the U.S. District Court, was subsequently appointed in 1992 by President George Herbert Walker Bush, and served in that position for seven years. President Clinton then appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where she served for eleven years. On August 6, 2009, the U.S. Senate approved her confirmation to the Supreme Court of the United States, making her the third woman, the first Hispanic, the first Latina, and the 111th justice to serve on the Court.
As if that were not enough, she also had time to write books. I highly recommend My Beloved World, which is her autobiography. (For those who might have kids, there are middle and elementary school versions too.)
Despite all of these enormous accomplishments, for much of your life you were not someone people gave restaurant reservations to, and you were not getting everything you wanted so easily. What is it like to be a public persona now?
It is very strange. Last night after dinner I went to the Yankees/Red Sox game at Fenway. Next to the Yankees suite where I was sitting was a Red Sox suite. I sat down, and everybody in the Red Sox suite was taking pictures of me. One of them reached over and wanted to shake my hand, and I spent a period of time shaking their hands and talking to them and saying hello. I finally said, “I’ve got to get back to the game.” Those moments are no longer unusual, and it is a bit strange.
I had a child once ask me, “What is it like to be a part of history?” It took me aback because, as I explained to her, that is not what I spend my time thinking about. I know it, I see it, I experience it, but if I chose to integrate it into myself I would stop living my life. I might be too scared, and I would be overtaken by that as opposed to trying to continue to live a meaningful life. If you don’t choose to focus your life on what you think is important, you lose sight of the fact that other stuff isn’t.
I am grateful when people are kind to me. I am grateful when they recognize me with happiness, although I suspect in some audiences there might be a different reaction. But I don’t pay as much attention to that as others might.
David Rubenstein
So, is anything new going on at the Court these days? Anything you can talk about?
Sonia Sotomayor
Well, I say this because I have a new family member. I was just in the Garden Room here at the Academy with one of my dear former law clerks, Niko Bowie, who is now a professor at Harvard Law School. He has a one-week-old daughter. As we were talking, Cora Sophia was crying. I asked him how much sleep he gets, and he said, “Not much.”
I think most parents forget that when there is a new child in the family it disrupts everything, doesn’t it? It changes your world.
The Court is a family in a way that few judicial groupings are. We are nine justices who sit together on every single case. We meet together all the time. I probably see more of them than I might have chosen to if given a choice.
I joke about that, but we meet not only to hear arguments, to conference, and to cast votes; we also attend all sorts of functions together because of tradition, starting with the State of the Union, Historical Society dinners, and other traditions in which we meet and socialize. You become a family, and, like with all families, you agree on some things and you disagree on a lot of other things.
And when there is a new member, that family conversation changes. The axis changes dramatically. There are those who will ask us, or ask me, to predict what that change will be. That is not a useful enterprise, for me at least. I have to watch this development and participate in it with as open a mind as I can have.
David Rubenstein
Do you think the image of the Court will change because of what has gone on?
Sonia Sotomayor
I think many fear that. And I think our image is the thing we have to guard most jealously, which requires us to work together in a way that upholds the sense of integrity of the Court. I believe every member who comes to the Court quickly becomes indoctrinated in understanding how important our role is. We learn very quickly that what is not important is us as individuals.
This institution has been around for over 230 years, and people have respected it for what it has done for our country, so we quickly learn that we have to put aside our individual interests and work on behalf of our nation and this Court that we all revere.
I disagree with many of my colleagues on a lot of issues, but the one thing we are united around is our passion for the Constitution, our laws, and our Court. So, it is my hope that we will find a way not to tarnish that institution.
David Rubenstein
Let us talk about your life story, which is quite compelling. I said earlier that your parents “immigrated” from Puerto Rico. That probably isn’t the correct way to say it because Puerto Rico is part of the United States. They migrated from Puerto Rico and came to the Bronx. You were the firstborn in your family, and you have a younger brother. You were living in a housing project. What was your life like as you were growing up?
Sonia Sotomayor
I never perceived myself as poor, because I was rich in the important things. I was rich in family and love. And so, for me, my life was normal. It was my world. Cardinal Spellman was my first exposure to understanding that the world was different than the world I lived in, and it got to be more starkly different when I went to Princeton. Then I knew what wealth was. And I found out that I didn’t have it.
It was not an easy life by any means. Both my parents worked. I developed diabetes when I was seven years old. My dad had an addiction, alcohol, and it caused a great deal of unhappiness in my home.
David Rubenstein
You were coming home from school and saw people crying near your house, which is how you found out your father had died. You were nine years old. Your mother raised you and your younger brother. She didn’t have a very big income. How did she manage?
Sonia Sotomayor
I wish I were as brave as my mother. She brought herself from Puerto Rico to the United States by joining the WACs during World War II. Her own mother had died when she was nine years old, and her father had abandoned the family well before that. After her mother died, her sister took her in. It was not a happy life for her – much more unhappy than mine.
Alone, without knowing anyone on the mainland, she joined the WACs and came over. My mom always understood that the only way to succeed in life was through education. There was a college near her home in Puerto Rico, and she would watch the girls coming from the college, walking to the post office, which is where they socialized, and she would follow, listening to their conversations.
Some of the conversations were frivolous, like most college students might have, and a lot of them involved things she did not understand. And she wanted to understand. She was driven by this thought that if she got educated, and certainly if she educated her children, then she would move up in the world in a way that she could not otherwise.
She became a practical nurse after she left the Army. That was a huge step, first, for a woman of her generation and, second, for someone with her background. After she became a practical nurse, she held onto a dream of being a registered nurse someday, which she fulfilled when she was in her forties. After my dad died, she worked six, sometimes seven days a week. She had two jobs most of the time.
She did everything possible to further our education, including sending my brother and me to a Catholic school, which shocked our family because it was expensive, but the school gave her a twofer. They charged only one tuition for my brother and me. That is how we made it: through hard work and dedication to education.
David Rubenstein
When did you realize you were a good student? Did you struggle in the beginning, or were you always really good?
Sonia Sotomayor
I was a marginal student during my first four years in school, and in retrospect I figured out why. I learned Spanish before I learned English. My father spoke only Spanish, so at home we only spoke Spanish. My grandmother, who I adored, only spoke Spanish, as did most of my aunts and uncles. My mainstay language was Spanish.
When I started school, I was just beginning to learn English. My mother now tells the story that in first and second grade the sisters came to her and said, “You have to stop speaking Spanish at home.” My mother said okay and then came home and continued speaking Spanish. Those days you didn’t fight with authority; you just ignored it.
She said there was no choice because Spanish was my dad’s language; it was their language. After my father died, my mother entered a period of what I, using amateur psychology, always thought was depression. Later she corrected me: “No, I was just in grief.” But that grief was a pall over our home, and my only escape was books. I found the local library, and I started to learn how to read. Once I did that, it started me on the path to academic success.
David Rubenstein
You did well at Cardinal Spellman, but you didn’t have the money for Advanced Placement courses, college prep courses, sat prep courses, and the like. Still, you must have done pretty well, because you got into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Why did you turn down Harvard and Yale and go to Princeton?
Sonia Sotomayor
First of all, I didn’t know what an Ivy League school was. In retrospect, I have no idea how I wrote a college essay without having anybody review it, but I did. I didn’t know better.
My high school debate coach, who was a year ahead of me on the boys’ side of Cardinal Spellman, went to Princeton and called me up in September and said, “Sonia, you have to go to an Ivy League school.” “What’s that?” “Best colleges in the United States.” “I can’t afford that.” “Sonia, they give you financial aid.” “So how much does it cost to apply? I can’t afford that either.” “They’ll waive it; just ask for a waiver.” “So which schools are they?”
He mentioned Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and a couple of others, and I said, “ok, so where do I get the applications?” “Go to the guidance counselor.” So I applied, and I got into all three, not fully understanding what I was getting myself into. I went to visit each of them, starting with Radcliffe. I took a train from New York up to Boston and thought to myself, this train is not very different than the subway in New York.
My interviewer was a senior woman with white coiffured hair, a beautiful black dress, and what I knew were genuine pearls because I had never seen them, but I knew what fake ones looked like. Her office had a white couch and a red wingback chair. Two poodles – I guess they were French poodles, black and white – were yapping at her feet.
She sat on the sofa, and I noted that it didn’t have any plastic on it (where I grew up, nobody had furniture that didn’t have plastic on it). The poodles sat next to her, and I sat on the wingback chair.
I was speechless. This was an environment I had never, ever been in. I didn’t know what to do or say. It was the only time in my life I have run away. It was the shortest interview I have ever engaged in. I could not have been with this woman more than ten or fifteen minutes. I couldn’t get myself to ask her a question.
I literally ran out of the room, went to the assistant at the front desk, and told her, “There are some students who are intending to meet me and show me the campus. Please tell them I had an emergency arise.” Then I left and went straight home. When I got to my house, my mom looked at me and said, “You were supposed to stay overnight. What are you doing here?” “Mom, I don’t belong there.” And I didn’t go there.
David Rubenstein
Have you ever thought how successful your life could be if you had gone to Harvard?
Sonia Sotomayor
I have considered it. Anyway, the next visit was to Yale, and, since it was at the tail end of the Vietnam War, a lot of protest was going on, and the Yale Latinos were very radicalized. I went and spent a couple of hours with a group of Latino students who were trying to recruit me to attend Yale.
They were talking about doing away with the “whities.” I, a Catholic girl from an institution that supported the war, who was dating a man I knew I was going to marry (and whom I did marry), who is not Latino but white – I sat listening to talk about Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution and knew I didn’t belong there either.
Next, I went to Princeton, and I am there with my friend from high school, and he has very long hair and friends who are just like him, and I think, I am a little more comfortable here.
David Rubenstein
When you got to Princeton, how did you feel? Did you feel at home with the wealthy, prep-school types there, or did you think of transferring? What was it like?
Sonia Sotomayor
No, I didn’t think of transferring, because frankly I don’t know that I knew it was an option. Our choices were to stay or to drop out, go back home, or go to a local college. There wasn’t a sense that there might be something comparable to this education in a better environment. It was a different world.
I was an alien in that world and so very different from my classmates. I don’t know, frankly, that that’s ever changed in any of the environments I joined afterward, including the Court. It sounds like a small thing, but virtually all of my colleagues are opera lovers. I like jazz.
We are different in terms of the worlds we travel in and the things we do and enjoy. Not that we don’t have some overlap, but once you are a person like me from a world that’s so different from the world I ended up in, you never quite belong in either. But you figure out how to live in both.
So that is what I do. I inhabit two worlds that I have learned intimately: the one I came from, because I lived it and still carry it with me; and the world I am in now. I am a Princeton/Yale graduate, former prosecutor, former partner at a law firm, district and circuit court judge. People look at me and say, “You belong more than anyone else.”
David Rubenstein
You were elected to Phi Beta Kappa, but you didn’t know what it was and threw the invitation in the wastepaper basket. Tell us about that.
Sonia Sotomayor
I was going to dinner with a friend. She came to pick me up, and while I was putting my shoes on she sat in the chair next to my wastepaper basket. She said, “Sonia, I don’t usually look in people’s wastepaper baskets, but it’s a little hard to miss that there’s an envelope that says Phi Beta Kappa on it.” I looked at her and said, “Yes, Felice, that’s a scam. They told me they’re the most prestigious organization in the United States and that to join the club I have to pay them money. Why would I pay them?”
She looked at me and she said, “Sonia.” Then she explained what Phi Beta Kappa was and said, “If you don’t want to pay, I’ll pay for you.” I was so embarrassed that a friend would offer to pay for me that I said, “No, if you think it’s that important, I will pay.” I still thought it was a scam, but I took the envelope out of the wastepaper basket, and I paid.
David Rubenstein
Did you know you wanted to go to law school when you entered Princeton? When did you decide, and what law schools did you apply to?
Sonia Sotomayor
I don’t remember exactly how many I applied to, but it wasn’t a lot. I did apply to Harvard and, I think, to Columbia and Stanford. I knew my grades were good and my lsat scores were good, so I had a sense that I was competitive.
I was accepted to both Harvard and Yale, and what made up my mind to choose Yale was that I spoke to a number of alumni from both schools. To a person, every Harvard alumni I spoke to said, “They were the toughest years of my life, hardest schooling I ever received, but I loved it.” And every Yalie I talked to said, “They were the best years of my life.” That difference led me to Yale.
David Rubenstein
So, you turned down Harvard twice. If they offer you an honorary degree, would you turn that down?
Sonia Sotomayor
I probably wouldn’t turn that down. But Yale beat them to that too.
David Rubenstein
How did you find Yale Law School?
Sonia Sotomayor
I felt totally overwhelmed. It was the first time since fourth grade that I actually felt inferior to most of my classmates. I am there in class with people like Martha Minow, Stephen Carter, and Bill Eskridge. There were people there whose brilliance far exceeded anything I had ever dealt with, even at Princeton.
My sense of inadequacy was very great. However, it is my wont that when I feel inadequate I just work harder. So, I jumped into Yale and tried then, as I have most of my life, to figure out how to succeed there.
David Rubenstein
Usually people who win the Pyne Prize and graduate summa from Princeton, attend Yale Law School, and get on the Yale Law Journal go to clerk on a court of appeals or at the Supreme Court. Why did you not choose to do something like that?
Sonia Sotomayor
I had been highly academic for seven years. At Yale I was on two law journals. In addition to the Yale Law Journal, I was managing editor of the International Law Journal, which was then called the Journal of World Public Order. I thought clerking was going to be another academic exercise, that I would be in the library for a year, writing bench memos for judges. I wanted to go out and work.
I also didn’t think I could afford to be a clerk because the pay was so much less than the pay for going into practice. Law clerks were earning even less money than I made at the da’s office. So, the idea of forgoing a paying job made no sense to me.
I tell people it is hard to be on the Supreme Court of the United States and say you have a professional regret. But this was my one mistake because clerking is so important to the development of your career. By clerking you advance your knowledge of the legal system by about five years. It’s a jump-start to becoming a lawyer, and so it is worth the initial diminution of salary.
Now, there is a financial inducement to clerking in the federal system. You get a sizable bonus at the end of your year with a judge. On the district court it’s $75,000 or $100,000. On the court of appeals, it’s at least $150,000, and it’s now $400,000 for Supreme Court clerks. The day a law clerk leaves my office, he or she earns more than I do.
David Rubenstein
An associate justice of the Supreme Court earns about $200,000?
Sonia Sotomayor
$250,000.
David Rubenstein
So, when your clerk goes to practice law after clerking for a year, he or she gets a salary of maybe $200,000 plus a $400,000 bonus?
Sonia Sotomayor
That’s right.
David Rubenstein
Oh, that’s not bad at all. At Yale you had a chance encounter with Robert Morgenthau, a distinguished prosecutor and district attorney in New York, and he convinced you to join him. Were you happy you did that?
Sonia Sotomayor
Best decision I made in my life. José Cabranes, who is now a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and is probably the most prominent Puerto Rican lawyer in New York City, was general counsel at Yale when I was in law school. He took me under his wing.
One day he was introducing me at a function and said, “She’s the most unusual of mentees. Every single decision she makes she comes and discusses it at length with me. I give her my advice, it’s clear she’s thinking very thoughtfully about what I say, and then she leaves me, and she does the exact opposite thing.”
He told me to clerk, and I didn’t listen. He told me to go to a law firm, and I didn’t listen. Most Yalies did not go to a da’s office. Most went to clerk or to one of the big law firms or into a government position, but I liked being in the courtroom, and I had a sense that I wanted to do courtroom work.
I had done a barrister’s union, or mock trial, at Yale. One of the professors later said he remembered me from that episode because I did something he had never seen a student do before. I said, “It just seemed the right thing to do.” I have learned subsequently that intuition is fed by human knowledge when you are in the courtroom, or at least that the knowledge you gain leads you to understand how you should perform in a courtroom and what you should do.
David Rubenstein
Your role in that job was to put people in jail. Was that difficult, especially since the people you were putting in jail had underprivileged circumstances in many cases?
Sonia Sotomayor
People assume that because I had a not privileged background, that will make me soft on crime. Or they equate the two in a way that is a misjudgment.
When people do serious crimes, they are hurting people, and if you hurt people you pay for that. It is both your moral and legal obligation. That doesn’t mean you don’t use judgment as a judge in figuring out what the right punishment is for a particular person under individual circumstances, but you do understand that there is injury from crime.
It is not all economic crime, and even when it is an economic crime, there are people who suffer and suffer deeply. And so those choices are not the hard ones. The hard ones, when you are poor, involve understanding the lack of access to justice, the lack of a system that is responsive to the due process rights of people who don’t have the resources to access justice in the way others do.
Those weaknesses in the system trouble people like me even when we are prosecutors or judges, because we are concerned about fairness and justice. That is what the justice system is about: treating people fairly. We cannot control the outcomes. If you do something, you have to face judgment, and my hope is that you will face it in a fair system.
David Rubenstein
After five years of doing this, you joined a small law firm and eventually became a partner. Then at the age of thirty-six or thirty-seven somebody said, “You should apply to be a federal district judge.”
Sonia Sotomayor
That was the managing partner of my law firm. He said, “Sonia, you should apply. They are looking for people like you, and I think you will be selected.” I looked at him and said, “I’m thirty-six years old. Are you crazy? You don’t become a judge until you are in your late forties or early fifties at least.” I ignored him.
David Rubenstein
When people told me I should get out of the practice of law, I took it that they didn’t want me to stay in the firm. But you didn’t take it that way. They wanted you to be a judge.
Sonia Sotomayor
When I was offered partnership a few years before that moment, the then head partner said, “We know you are going back to public service. We know that is where your heart is. So, we are not going to have you forever. The only commitment we ask you to make is that, whenever you are in private practice, practice with us.” That seemed like a fair offer. They all knew that my heart was in public service.
David Rubenstein
So, you filled out the application, and you ultimately got an interview with Patrick Moynihan.
Sonia Sotomayor
I did.
David Rubenstein
And he said, “If you wait awhile, I’ll get this done.” Is that more or less right?
Sonia Sotomayor
That’s exactly what he said to me.
David Rubenstein
So, you became a federal district judge and held that position for about seven years, and then a president of a different party, Bill Clinton, decided to nominate you for the Second Circuit. Were you surprised that after just seven years you were going to be a Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge?
Sonia Sotomayor
Well, I said no the first time he called.
David Rubenstein
Really?
Sonia Sotomayor
Yes. The White House counsel’s office asked me if I would consider being a circuit court judge, and I said, “I have only been here five years. I love it too much. I don’t want to leave. Thank you but think about me later.” And I hung up.
I told a friend who is a judge and a very discreet man. He said, “I clerked for a district court judge who loved being a trial judge, and he was asked to go on the court of appeals multiple times, and when he finally got to the age where he wanted to be on the court of appeals, politics had changed and nobody wanted him anymore.”
He said, “Sonia, you may want to be a trial judge now, but if you think that someday, and it doesn’t matter when, you might want to be on the court of appeals, you may want to reconsider your decision.” I thought about what he said and realized he was right. When I got the second call, I said yes.
David Rubenstein
You were nominated, confirmed, and served on the Second Circuit for about eleven years before you got a call from Barack Obama. Is that correct?
Sonia Sotomayor
No. The first call was from Greg Craig, the White House counsel, and his assistant, Cassandra Butts. They said they had reason to believe there would be a vacancy on the Supreme Court and would I consider giving permission for them to do a background check on me.
I received this call at about 8:00 in the morning. I was going to the gym before going into the office, so I had a gym bag and an umbrella because it was raining. I’m struggling to get the phone to my ear. The clerk of the court tells me the White House counsel’s office wants to talk to me. I take the call. I say yes, and then I have to sit down for a while.
When I finally got to the office and play the call back in my head, I started thinking, “What did I get myself into now?”
David Rubenstein
Ultimately, you had an interview with President Obama. Did he ask tough questions?
Sonia Sotomayor
My meeting with him was supposed to last half an hour. We went over an hour. When I came out, I said to his staff, “It’s hard to grade yourself in an interview, so I don’t know how I did. I do know that I understand one of his strengths as an executive.”
He got the best out of me. He asked tough questions but not in a way that attacked me. All the questions that everybody else was asking in a negative way, he asked in a neutral way, he put me at ease, and let me answer honestly. Since I got the job, I think I did all right.
David Rubenstein
When you found out you got the job, did you call your mother first?
Sonia Sotomayor
The first thing I did was finish packing clothes to go to Washington. A friend drove me there, and we got lost. It was raining, and his TomTom went out, and we ended up somewhere in Virginia. By the time I ended up in Washington, about 2:30 in the morning, my mother was already soundly asleep. They had brought her to Washington ahead of me.
David Rubenstein
It’s hard to miss Washington on the map. I wonder how . . .
Sonia Sotomayor
I was busy working on my nomination speech and not watching where we were going . . .
David Rubenstein
When you are sworn in, your mother is holding a Bible. Was it a family Bible?
Sonia Sotomayor
It was. I will tell you about that Bible. I had to sentence a Mormon defendant, and in the sentencing process I learned more about the Mormon religion than I had known previously. His family, including his mom, was there, and I mentioned to the audience how impressed I was with many of the tenets and values of the Mormon religion.
Sometime later I received a package in my office: a large box wrapped in tattered brown paper and the defendant’s mother’s name is in the corner. I have been told not to open unsolicited packages, so I got the marshals. They brought a dog, and the dog didn’t smell anything. They decided to put the box through an x-ray machine and discovered there were multiple boxes. They said, “We don’t see anything on the machine, but we are a little suspicious.”
So, they get the dog into his bomb-proof cape and get themselves in their gear, and they open the box and find a second box. In that they find a third. And in the third box there’s a Mormon Bible.
The mom sent it with a note explaining that I had spoken about their religion and she thought I should learn more about it. So, she sent me a Bible. Now, as judges in the room will know, I cannot accept gifts and certainly not from a defendant’s mother. I thought long and hard about what I could do, because sending it back seemed like the wrong thing to do.
I had my assistant call the Library of Congress to find out the value of the Bible, and then I sent the mom a note thanking her and telling her I couldn’t accept the book as a gift but that I could pay for it. I included a money order and said, “Please cash it, and I will happily keep the book.” And that is the book I used for my swearing in.
David Rubenstein
When you joined the Supreme Court and met the eight other justices, were you in awe of them initially, or did you say, “Well, they’re just like anybody else”?
Sonia Sotomayor
I was in awe of them, and I still am. My colleagues are incredibly smart. They challenge you at every step. In fact, we challenge each other. One of the wonderful things about being on a court with people who are this smart and this engaged in legal questions is you make each other’s opinions better. You draft an opinion, and the dissents that come out force you to tighten up what you are saying, to take approaches that are better and stronger. This is a group that engages.
David Rubenstein
A couple of questions about the Court that people always ask: Are we going to see television cameras in the Supreme Court anytime soon?
Sonia Sotomayor
David Souter said, “over his dead body.” I don’t know that the rest of us feel that strongly. At my hearing I said, and I meant it, that I was open to considering cameras in the courtroom, but the experience of the nomination process and my experience on the Court has led me to change my mind.
When I was going through my nomination process, every single senator who spoke with me did so in his or her office while a debate on some issue or another was happening on the Senate floor. No one was watching the tv and listening to the debate. Every one of them was talking to me. And I knew that when I left their office they would immediately get on the phone, or their staff would talk to them about something, or someone else would come in to meet with them.
Those speeches we see on television: they are to empty air. The senators never hear each other talk. I have asked some of them, “What do you think has led to the partisanship in our government?” And many of the more senior senators have said to me that it was when cameras went into the chamber. Because then they didn’t have to be there anymore. And once they stopped being there, they stopped listening to each other, and they stopped talking to each other.
Many of them have told me that in earlier times they would have joint lunches in the Senate. They have stopped having those joint lunches. Each party has its own party lunches, its own committee meetings. They rarely meet and talk like normal people.
The other thing I saw was that during my confirmation hearing many of the senators from the party that did not support me would ask horribly tough questions, and once the cameras were shut off they were very nice to me. There was nothing wrong with that. I am not criticizing it. I am just saying that the cameras change people’s public persona in a way that they feel is necessary. I fear that may happen for the Court if we allow cameras in.
David Rubenstein
Sometimes I don’t read everything I am supposed to read before I go to a meeting, but the justices really do read the briefs, right?
Sonia Sotomayor
Absolutely.
David Rubenstein
So, when they ask questions of the advocates, are they asking for rhetorical reasons (because they know the answer but are trying to influence another justice), or are they really trying to get information from the advocate?
Sonia Sotomayor
It depends on the question, and it depends on the situation. Often questions are informational. As much as people think I am trying to make a point, a lot of my questions are based on the record or the lack of it, but sometimes you hear someone asking something and the attorney fails to raise what you think is the important point the Court needs to decide. Then you will get a question that is not quite rhetorical but more informative to the conversation.
David Rubenstein
After oral arguments you have conferences where each justice says I will vote this way or that way. Do you try to persuade or lobby each other, or does it not work that way?
Sonia Sotomayor
Remember that a large percentage of our cases – certainly not much less than 50 percent, and we have been as high as 70 percent in some years – are unanimous. On those cases there is very little talk after the conference. If you are unanimous or nearly unanimous, there is little need to convince someone to change his or her mind.
On the closer questions, occasionally you will have conversations. I say “occasionally” because there are some situations in which people’s views are clearly fixed. We have all read the materials, we have all heard the argument, we have decisions from courts of appeals that have been grappling with this issue over a number of years, so you have a sense of those cases in which further conversation is not going to promote any change.
David Rubenstein
Do you ever walk down the hall and say to another justice, “I will vote your way on this case if you vote my way on that case”? That never happens?
Sonia Sotomayor
Well, you don’t barter that way, but you can say to someone, “You know, we have compromised in so many other places . . .” – and you list the places where you have compromised – “now it is your turn.” You can say something like that, but it is not a barter.
David Rubenstein
How was it when you had only eight justices for almost a year? Did you try to avoid four-to-four decisions?
Sonia Sotomayor
Very narrowly. But there is also a value to narrow rulings. I come from a common law background, and in the common law, cases are made step by step. You look at the facts of the individual case, and you rule just on those facts, and then you let the next case come along and decide whether the direction you are going makes sense.
It has been the wont of the Supreme Court in more recent times to rule more broadly than the facts of individual cases. I think when it is four-to-four, there is an automatic inducement to go back to that narrowing. It is my hope that, as partisanship in the country increases, the Court might rethink things and go back to a slower, more incremental approach to decision-making.
David Rubenstein
Do the justices write their opinions, or do the clerks write them and the justices edit them?
Sonia Sotomayor
It happens both ways. Justice Stevens always wrote his opinions. His clerks basically just checked citations. Other Justices – I am one of them – have their clerks draft, and then we edit.
David Rubenstein
In Washington everything leaks. How come you don’t leak your decisions? Nobody seems to know in advance. Why is that?
Sonia Sotomayor
It is wonderful that there is an ethos against that. It is a very strong ethos, and we take pride in that.
David Rubenstein
When you are the new justice on the Court you have two responsibilities. You are supposed to answer the door in the conference, and you are also in charge of the cafeteria committee. Are those important responsibilities, and did you do anything to make the food better?
Sonia Sotomayor
Opening the door: it doesn’t happen often, so there is not a whole lot of work there. The cafeteria committee: at the end of my first, and only, year as head of the committee, a Washington Post article graded the government cafeterias, and the Supreme Court cafeteria received an F. The Chief Justice sent me a note in the middle of Elena Kagan’s hearings and said, “Sonia, an F? You’re fired.” I wrote back to him, “All according to plan, Chief.”
David Rubenstein
You have been on the Court since 2009. You obviously enjoy it, and everybody is very pleased that you are doing the job you are doing. How much longer would you like to do this? Ten years, twenty years, thirty years?
Sonia Sotomayor
I am like Justice Ginsburg. For as long as I can.
David Rubenstein
And your health is okay? You mentioned you have had diabetes since you were seven. You have it under control, and your health is good, and you are exercising a lot?
Sonia Sotomayor
Yes.
David Rubenstein
That will make a lot of people happy. I appreciate you taking the time to be with us today and giving us a very interesting conversation about your remarkable life and life at the Court. Congratulations on what you have achieved.
Sonia Sotomayor
Thank you, David.
© 2019 by David Rubenstein and Sonia Sotomayor