- Good afternoon and welcome
to the University of Wisconsin
and to the 2016 Robert
W Kastenmeier Lecture.
I'm Rebecca Blank,
I'm the Chancellor here at
the University of Wisconsin,
and I am delighted to see all of you here
at today's very special event.
I wanna thank the Kastenmeier committee
and co-chairs Peter
Kristensson and Anuj Desai
for organizing what is going
to be a memorable conversation
with the Honorable
Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
And of course, thanks to the Justice
for spending her day here in Madison.
The Kastenmeier lecture
reflects our law school's
strong commitment
to what we call the law in
action approach to teaching.
That assumes that a lawyer's role
is not just to know and apply the law,
but to solve complex problems
in a way that improves lives
and strengthens communities.
This tradition is one important reason
why our law school consistently
attracts internationally
and nationally renowned legal scholars.
Dean Margaret Raymond is one such scholar.
Dean Raymond has a deep understanding
of the unique role of a public institution
in educating lawyers to serve
an incredibly diverse mix of clients.
That understanding drives her commitment
to helping build programs
that introduce students from
disadvantaged backgrounds
to careers in the law, programs
like the James E Jones Junior
Pre-Law Scholars Program
that launched this summer that
gave freshmen and sophomores
from traditionally underserved groups
from around the nation
and across the UW system
a chance to see what
law school is all about.
I wanna thank Dean Raymond
for her leadership,
thank our moderators and
our distinguished guests
for what is going to be a great afternoon.
Thank you all, and please join
me in welcoming Dean Raymond.
(audience applauds)
- Good afternoon, thank you, Chancellor.
It is my pleasure and
privilege to welcome all of you
to this year's Kastenmeier lecture.
The lecture is supported
by the fund established
to honor Robert W Kastenmeier,
an outstanding graduate
of the University of Wisconsin Law School
who served with great
distinction in the US Congress
from 1958 until 1990.
During the 10-year representative,
Kastenmeier made special
contributions to many fields,
including improvement of the judiciary,
which makes our talk today
particularly special.
I understand that Dorothy
Kastenmeier's here with us,
so I wanna make sure that we
recognize and welcome Dorothy.
(all applauding)
Dorothy, thanks so much for being here.
It's great to have you back in Madison.
In honor of Representative Kastenmeier,
the planning committee that
the Chancellor mentioned
organizes a speaker or event that reflects
one of the Congressman's
rich array of legislative interests.
I wanna make sure to join
in thanking the committee.
And also our staff who,
without whom a day like this
would not have been possible.
(all applauding)
This year's Kastenmeier lecturer
is Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Justice Sotomayor joined
the US Supreme Court
as an Associate Justice in 2009.
Before her appointment to the court,
she attended Princeton
University and Yale Law School,
served as an Assistant District Attorney
in the New York County
District Attorney's office,
litigated international commercial
matters in New York City
as first and associate and their partner
at the firm of Pavia & Harcourt,
and served for six years as a
judge on the US District Court
for the Southern District of
New York, 11 years as a judge
on the US Court of Appeals
from the Second Circuit
until her appointment to
the Supreme Court in 2009.
She's a born New Yorker like me
and is the author of an
extraordinarily beautiful memoir,
"My Beloved World."
If you haven't read it,
I highly recommend it.
We are delighted and privileged
to have her here today
as our Kastenmeier lecturer,
but our format today
differs a bit from a traditional lecture.
The presentation today
will be a conversation
between the Justice and two
of her former law clerks,
Lindsey Powell and Rob Yablon.
For those of you unfamiliar
with the phenomenon of law clerks,
law clerks are relatively
recent law graduates
who spend often a year
working closely with a judge
on the judge's work.
Lindsey Powell, the
first of our moderators,
is now an appellate attorney
at the Civil Division at the
US Department of Justice,
and Rob Yablon is an
Assistant Professor of Law
here at the Law School.
The relationship
between the Supreme Court
justices and their law clerks
is formed like metamorphic rock,
from a combination of
time, pressure, and heat.
(audience laughs)
For a very intense year,
those law clerks have the
extraordinary opportunity
at the very beginning of their
careers to serve, support,
and learn from justices
at the pinnacle of theirs.
That intense experience forms
remarkable and enduring bonds
of appreciation, respect,
commitment, and connection,
and I imagine you'll see some of that
as Justice Sotomayor talks
with her former clerks.
Please join me in welcoming
Justice Rob and Lindsey.
(all applauding)
- I am delighted to be in Madison.
It's a beautiful, beautiful campus.
And I've had the privilege
of meeting your Chancellor
and the Dean of the law school,
and the Dean of the
School of Education today,
and I am both tremendously
impressed and deeply touched
by the commitment they
have to this university
and to its participants,
both the faculty and the
students, administrators.
You are very fortunate students,
the ones who are in this room.
I'm more fortunate, because
I'm getting to have a talk
with two very favorite people of mine,
Lindsey and Rob.
When I became a justice,
I decided I needed,
we were entitled to four law clerks,
and I decided, since I knew very little
about the inner workings of the court
other than what I had read in books,
and sometimes you're a little
dubious about what you read,
truth only comes out
when you experience it,
I thought that maybe I should hire
two law clerks with experience.
And so a friend reached
out to a number of justices
and said, do you have
somebody to recommend
in your current crop of law clerks
who might wanna stay on for another year.
Lindsey worked for
Justice John Paul Stevens
whom I grew to love, and Rob
worked for another justice
who's incredibly important to
me and my life on the court,
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
And without them,
I don't think I would have
made through the year.
(audience chuckles)
And so I am both eternally
grateful to them,
but I'm more privileged that I know them.
They're very special human beings
who care a lot about the
profession and about others,
and so I'm very, very
proud of both of them,
and so thrilled that
we're doing this today.
Thank you both for being here with me.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
- Justice, thank you so much
for joining us in Madison.
It's wonderful to have you here.
It was an incredible privilege
for Lindsey and for me
to be able to be your law clerks
during your first year on
the Supreme Court, and--
- I worked you harder than
anybody else, hard to believe.
(all laugh)
- You've described that time in your life
as almost an out of body experience.
You had just been through
a grueling Senate confirmation process,
you'd been thrust into
the public spotlight,
you'd been uprooted from New York
and you were still
acclimating to Washington, DC.
And you were starting this
incredibly high pressure,
high stakes job that, many
people may not remember this,
but the very first case that you heard
just a month after being sworn in
was a case called Citizens United.
(audience laughs)
- Clarence Thomas called me
before I began reading the recent accuse,
just when I joined the
court, and he said to me,
"I feel so sorry for you."
(audience laughs)
It's gonna take you days
to read all those things.
He was right. (laughs)
- So you're now,
we don't like to think
that it's been this long,
but you're now about to start
your seventh term on the court.
And so you've been there
for some huge cases,
some on the winning side, some not.
You have written a bestselling
memoir, you have traveled
every corner of the
country, it seems like.
You've been on "Sesame
Street" more than once.
(audience laughs)
- Threw out a first
pitch at Yankee Stadium.
- Okay, that, too.
But does this all still seem surreal,
or has being a Supreme Court Justice
become your normal life now?
- Well, once I accepted that my old life
had completely ended,
you mentioned some of the
things that had ended.
My life in New York, which I love,
my sense of privacy and
lack of notoriety had ended.
And once I accepted that my new
life would just be abnormal,
it's become easier to accept.
But I come out and I see an audience of,
how many people are here, 1,500,
it always takes my breath away.
And there are other moments constantly
where I'm reminded that
this is not a normal life.
In particular, every year
at the State of the Union,
as I'm now in the front
row most of the time,
and it feels like, and I can
almost touch the President.
I assure you I can't,
(audience laughs) but,
you know, I'm that close.
There's no one better than me,
and I always marvel at
the fact that I'm there.
Shortly after he withdrew
from the election,
Governor Kasich was at Reagan Airport
and I was leaving on a trip,
and as I got to the front of the airport
my security drivers told me
that he was waiting to meet me.
Now, you have to understand,
I had just watched him on TV
almost every day for a number of weeks,
and the idea that he
would be waiting for me
still seems strange, it feels strange.
And I'm constantly reminded that,
in many ways, lots of ways,
I'm really, really blessed,
but in some ways cursed.
There is a burden with this job,
and it's not the burden of notoriety,
it is the burden of knowing
that the work I'm doing
affects so many people, and
that's something I never forget.
I often tell people, you know, I'm much,
much more conscious today than I ever was
when I was a judge on the lower courts
of how deeply the decisions
of the Supreme Court
affect the nation.
And if you agree with the way I voted,
you're very happy, right?
But I never forget that, in
every case, someone wins,
and there's an opposite, and
that is that someone loses,
and that burden feels very
heavy to me quite often.
And so, yes, a blessing and a curse.
- So different justices
take different approaches
in how they engage with the public
and respond to the demands on their time.
This is true both in
terms of thinking about
which events to participate in
and what to say at those events.
I was wondering how you think
about your public role in general
and how you make decisions
about how to engage,
and particularly in light of the norms
that limit to some extent
commentary by sitting justices
on matters that might
come before the court.
- Everybody would love to ask me
how particular cases of
interest to them would come out,
and I really can't tell you, okay?
In part because sometimes I don't know,
but in part because it
would be inappropriate.
Don't you think that it would
be strange if I as a justice
answered today a burning
question that you have
about how I would vote on a case
that I haven't heard, or that I've heard
but haven't conferenced
with my colleagues?
You would rightly believe
that I was a little biased, wouldn't you?
And it's not that we
don't go into the process
with some idea or some
inclination about the issue.
We're students of legal issues,
and we've been thinking about them.
But the one thing I've learned
through my many, many years of
being a judge, which is that
that process of adjudication
can change your mind.
And so it's important to
try to keep an open mind.
But we're human beings,
and if we announce today what
our ruling is going to be,
that kind of locks you into place.
So knowing that I can't
satisfy people, by the way,
that's what happens during the
Senate confirmation hearings,
that's why they'll never be a success,
because all the senators wanna know
is how I'll vote on whatever
issue's important to them.
And since I gotta keep saying
I can't answer that question,
they get very frustrated.
But having said that, as
I thought about my role,
my sense of what I could do,
that would be meaningful to
people, at least in my judgment.
I realize that the court is
a mystery to a lot of people.
It's not like the other
branches of government.
We don't have cameras in the courtroom,
and you can wait 'til the end
and I'll tell you how the
thinking has changed about that.
And we don't often go out
and talk publicly about
our internal deliberations.
We shouldn't, and so we don't.
It remains a mystery to many people,
and I think that that's a bad idea.
I realize that, if people
understood we're human beings,
if they understood that we carry with us
both backgrounds and experiences that,
they don't inform our decision-making,
but they certainly inform the process
and our discussions among ourselves,
because our experiences become
part of the conversation of
does this happen frequently.
Well, a lot of people think that happens
in cases involving my gender
or my ethnic background.
But do you know when it
happens most frequently?
When we 're talking about
whether an issue of discretion
in the lower courts arises often.
And because I'm one of the
few justices that has served
on both the district court
and the circuit court,
I can actually talk from experience.
And so, for me,
the value in the choice I made
when I got out of court was,
look, can't talk about the
internal deliberations,
but if I can talk to the
general public about who I am,
how important and passionate
I am about the law,
how important and passionate
my colleagues are about it,
even when we disagree,
then maybe we can change
people's perception of the court
as a distant and unknowable institution.
But I also realize there
was another role for me,
and one that I embrace openly, which is,
I believe in being a citizen
lawyer first and foremost.
And it's a phrase that I took
from one of my colleagues,
Justice Scalia, many, many years back.
I won't say how many,
'cause he'd be shocked, too,
if he were with us.
I introduced him at a law school function,
and his speech was
entitled "Citizen Lawyers,"
and he talked about the fact
that our founding fathers
were all lawyers, businessmen.
They had to make a living,
they had to support their
families, but they made sacrifices
for a nation that they wanted
to grow and help create.
And he talked about the
importance of both law,
but the participation of
lawyers in our community,
and it's stimulating
and bettering our lives.
And that talk has always stayed with me.
And so, in most of my
conversations with people,
that's a really big part
of what I'm trying to instill in you.
If I can make you walk
out of this courtroom,
out of this courtroom,
out of this auditorium
(audience laughs)
But the courtroom, too.
If I can make you walk
out of this auditorium
more invigorated about participating,
about becoming more civically involved
in the way you choose,
'cause I don't have a particular format,
work through your local schools,
work through your churches,
work in your black associations,
work to make us a better
place for everyone,
then I've accomplished my goals.
And I set those goals from a sense of,
there was a place that I could
leave an important legacy,
inspiring people to do more.
'cause, if we work at it
today, we can actually improve
some of the bigger problems
that our society faces.
- And now a very high bar
has been set for this event.
- Yes.
(audience laughs)
Now, some of you may know
that, when I was a child,
my mother made up a name for me,
it was called Aji, which was Hot Pepper.
And what she meant about it
was that I never seemed to sit still,
I was always bouncing up and
down and running and playing,
never paying much attention
to her or anything else
but what interested me.
I call it curiosity, okay?
(audience laughs)
She called it other things.
But I still am like that,
and I don't like sitting
down talking to people,
I like walking around.
So that's what I'm about
to do. (audience laughs)
Now, you'll see gentlemen
and women in suits,
most of them have these
little things in their ears.
They're the US Marshals
or your local police,
and they're here to protect
me from myself, not from you.
(audience laughs)
They don't like that I do this.
I do it anyway.
But you will create a problem
if you jump up unexpectedly, all right?
Then they get really nervous.
So I'll walk around, I'll shake your hand,
I might touch your shoulder.
If I recognize somebody in the
audience, I might hug them,
and I even give some other people hugs.
But don't jump up, don't scare them, okay?
All right, so I'm gonna continue.
I hope it's not disconcerting
to the two of you.
- [Lindsey] No, we'll shout after you.
- [Rob] We'll stay here, though.
- All right.
(all laugh)
- Unless anyone wants a hug.
- They both have children
under the age of three,
they're not running after me.
Okay.
- [Lindsey] Should I let you
get down the stairs first, or--
- Yeah, you can ask the question and I'll,
I'll bear it in mind. (Lindsey laughs)
- So as you just mentioned,
you've worked on the District Court
and the Court of Appeals as
well as the Supreme Court,
and you've noted in
previous talks and writings
that the experience on each
has been strikingly different.
And I'm wondering if there's
something that stood out to you
when you got to Supreme Court
that particularly surprised
you about it, either the work
or the community there, or
whether there's something
that you think would come as a surprise
to people less familiar with the court?
- Well, maybe I should
go to the background
and describe what I
think the differences are
among the three levels,
and there are differences.
When you're on the district court,
I've often said, this is the trial court.
It's the first court the
parties are coming before,
and there the facts of the
case are being developed.
The district court judge
is a singular judge
looking and developing those facts
and looking at the law that
the parties are arguing about,
and rendering a decision in the case.
But a large part of the work
of a district court judge
is resolving the issue
between the parties.
That's why there are so
many settlement agreements
and trial revel, 'cause
what you're trying to do
is do justice with the two
parties in front of you.
That's your focus.
They have a problem.
You're trying to help
when come to a resolution.
And sometimes they do it voluntarily
and consent to settlement, and other times
they want you to fix it
for them, and you do.
But that is really the idea,
the focus that you're on.
Now, you're the first court,
so you're gonna get some
interesting, novel questions,
but the vast majority of your caseload
is not those really Supreme Court cases.
They are the general work of a judge.
They are the individual
disputes between parties
that are largely controlled
by existing precedent.
And so, for those parties,
you're not a referee,
but you're the person attempting to do
what's right for them under the law.
When you get to the appellate court,
it means somebody lost below, right?
You're not gonna appeal a win, although,
surprisingly enough,
there are people who do,
'cause they don't like how they won.
And there's a lot of rules about that,
about when you can do
that and when you can't.
But on the appeals court, typically,
at least in the federal system,
less so in the state system, by the way.
In many, many state systems,
I can't speak about Wisconsin
'cause I didn't practice here
and am less familiar with it,
but in the state systems, appeals courts
can sometimes review the facts,
and they can actually determine
whether the trial court
or the jury made an error in their facts.
And so, in state courts, more frequently,
the courts will overturn a jury finding,
or even a judge's findings
on the basis of facts.
But that's not true in the federal system.
In the federal system,
you can only appeal an error in the law,
and there's always a but
in everything in life.
Some facts, but they're
more narrowly confined.
Did a judge say that a witness
said the light was green but,
in fact, the record shows
the witness said the light was red?
So there are some factual disputes
that can be answered or looked at.
But, because you're looking at the law,
errors of law in the main,
you're really looking at, how
do I decide this question,
both guided by Supreme Court precedent,
but often there's a whole lot
that the appellate courts
below the Supreme Court rule on
that never get to the Supreme Court.
There's tons and tons of issues
that circuit court judges
across the country are
dealing with every day
that will never appear
before the Supreme Court.
I'll explain why in a moment, okay?
So you're trying as a circuit court judge
to get the law right for your circuit,
and your circuit, we're
13 in the United States,
and the states and the territories
are divided up among
the 13 circuit courts.
Not in equal numbers, by the way.
It's all historical.
The circuits have been created
both from the foundation
of the creation of the federal system
where the First Circuit was
Boston and the states under it,
the Second where I served
only had three states,
New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.
And that was because New
York had the most cases,
and so they'd try to tag us
with states that had
lesser number of cases.
The Ninth Circuit is the biggest today,
and there's been talks
about breaking it up,
but under the Ninth Circuit
there are nine states and one territory,
and it is burgeoning with cases.
But that's because, when the
Ninth Circuit was created,
those states were underpopulated.
That changed.
So anyway, the circuit court I described
what we're trying to
do on a circuit court,
is to do justice for the circuit.
And go to for the law,
justice for whatever the Supreme
Court has said the law is,
but in all of those other areas
that are not likely to
get before the court,
our focus is ensuring on consistency
within the jurisprudence that
the court is involved in.
Now, go to the Supreme
Court, and what do you have?
You have a court who's
responsible for making sure
that there's consistency
across the nation.
So when do we take cases?
We take cases only when there's been
a circuit split, generally.
Few exceptions, but they're rare.
Most of the time we're waiting to see
whether the courts below can
agree on the right answer.
So you've got 13 circuits,
50-odd state Supreme Courts,
and a bunch of territorial high courts
often ruling on the same
question, and with some frequency
disagreeing, and that's
when we take the case.
It is impossible for me to tell you
what makes a difference between
two circuits disagreeing
or three or four, or five or six.
Generally, when we're on
the court, we're looking at
what the arguments have
been in the courts below,
and if we can identify
a part of the problem
that hasn't been fully aired
in the courts below, we wait.
There are some cases where the split
is not likely to err much new
because of the nature of the question,
and we might grand sure
it on one-to-one split.
So it really depends on that percolation.
And the reason for the
percolation is, you know,
two lawyers going to court,
the lawyers make the
best arguments they can,
a judge knocks down
some of those arguments,
finds one compelling,
and the next person in another
circuit comes in and says,
I got a better argument,
I've got a better approach.
And they go in and they
find a different approach,
and that circuit takes
that into consideration,
and that process happens for awhile.
And then, after awhile,
you start seeing that the
arguments are repetitive
and that they're all centering
around a nucleus of a legal issue,
and that's when the court will
step in more often than not.
So what is the Supreme Court doing?
We're establishing the
law for the whole country,
and we're setting the boundaries of law
on the facts of that particular case.
And so we're foreclosing an approach that
to some people was a winning
argument in the courts below,
and we're setting the discussion
on a different course,
on a different trajectory.
And what we're looking to do
is to do justice for
law as it's developing.
That's a really different approach.
That's why, if you listen
to Supreme Court arguments,
you will often hear
hypotheticals from the justices.
If we rule this way,
what's the stopping point
of your principal of law?
Will it mean that we will have to undo
the development of law
in this other field?
Doesn't mean that we're
gonna reach an absurd result
because, if we carry your argument
to its logical conclusion,
I'll give one from the Obamacare case,
doesn't mean that the government
can force you to eat broccoli, all right?
Those are the kinds of
questions we're asking,
because we understand that our rulings
have a long-term effect.
And so we are looking,
not at consistency necessarily
within the law of a circuit,
nor the individual
justice issues of a case,
but of the development of the law
as cohesive whole in a particular area.
And so that's a lot of different views
that are being considered
and talked about.
And so Lindsey's question was,
how is being on the
Supreme Court different?
We can sometimes lose sight
of the individuals involved in a case,
'cause many of our questions
are questions of law.
It's an evil that most
justices are aware of,
to remind yourself every day
that there are actually
human lives at issue,
not just the cold record
that we're reading.
You know, sometimes I got
out into the courtroom and,
particularly in some important cases,
I look around and try to
guess who the litigant is.
(audience chuckles)
I actually don't go on the internet,
'cause I think that's fair, that's unfair,
so I just go in and
watch people watching us
and try to guess who's the person
for whom it seems really personal.
And sometimes when we rule,
occasionally the people
are in the courtroom,
and when you see people
crying, it doesn't move you.
Sometimes they're tears of joy,
but sometimes there are
tears of deep sorrow.
I personally had not anticipated
how hard decision-making is on the Court.
Because of the big, that win
and lose part of the Court,
and the fact that we are affecting lives
throughout the country,
and sometimes across the
world in our rulings,
I'm always conscious that what I do
will always affect someone negatively.
Judging brings me less joy in
this situation because of it.
Mind you, I only vote
in the way I think is right under the law,
but justice has a price,
and it's one that I think
all of us should remember.
It's part of that, it's part
of the civic engagement,
and should be.
So whenever you're happy
about one of our outcomes,
think about the other side,
because there will be always another side.
So I think that's the biggest difference.
It's also harder to
negotiate with nine people
than it was with three. (audience laughs)
No, no, no, no, seriously.
You know, when I was on
the Court of Appeals,
every Court of Appeals judge knows
how to count to two, one, two.
Majority, you win.
You're on the Supreme Court,
you gotta count lower.
They gotta count to four, 'cause
you need five to win, okay?
And that tells you that
it's already harder
to convince four other people
than to convince one other person.
There's also group dynamics involved.
There's certainly pressure
when a larger group of justices
think the answer is one way
and you think the answer
should be another way.
You know, it's harder to resist.
It's like the jury of 12.
Those holdouts have a lot of courage,
and they really have to question
themselves very carefully
before they author a
dissenting opinion or hold out,
because you really have
to check if you're right.
As one of my colleagues has often said,
when eight other people
are disagreeing with you,
you better open your mind to
the possibility you're wrong.
And that is true.
That's why you will rarely
see a solo dissenting opinion.
It happens, but it doesn't
happen as frequently
as one would expect because
of the group dynamics.
And finally, I never understood
how comforting it was
to be on the lower court
and have someone above me fix my mistakes.
(audience laughing)
I don't have that luxury now.
It's really hard.
Hi.
I'm not turning my back,
'cause that poor camera guy
is following me around,
and I really don't,
it's not from a lack of
humility, believe me,
but there are people watching this
and I want them to see
me answering questions.
It's easier to do that
than to watch a screen
with the back of my head.
- [Rob] So, Justice,
maybe I'll try to build
on Lindsey's question
and make it a little bit more difficult.
- [Sonia] Go ahead.
- So you're--
- That's what they did to me
the entire year, you know
that? (audience laughs)
- Your career path has given
you a very unique vantage point
on our system of justice.
You have, you tried hundreds of cases
as a local prosecutor in New York,
you probably participated in hundreds more
when you were in private practice.
As a district and appellate court judge
you decided thousands of cases,
you see thousands of petitions for review
every year at the Supreme Court.
In your estimation, what is it
that our judicial system
does well and not so well,
and how might we be
able to make it better?
- Well, our judicial system
really does very well
in trying to teach judges
to be fair and impartial.
I think most judges really
aspire to uphold that standard.
And having traveled around the world
and talked to judges
from all over the world,
I have learned that the
little corruption we have
is a standard of hope for
the rest of the world.
That's not to say we don't have some,
there have judges
who have been prosecuted and convicted,
but our numbers is infinitesimally small
compared to the corruption
other nations face.
And we have an ethics about fairness
that is hard to teach to people.
It is imbued in our culture in a way that,
for me, drives who I am
and my work as a judge,
and I think it drives the work
of almost every other judge.
That passion, that sense of decency,
that sense of impartiality,
being the starting point for judging
I think is the best thing our system has.
Doesn't mean that we're perfect
at meeting that standard,
but if you don't value it,
you're never even gonna try,
and I think we try really hard.
Imperfect as it may be,
as incomplete as it may be sometimes,
we work at it, and I'm very proud of that.
It also means that we're really good,
most judicial systems, at trying
to ensure that all parties,
rich or poor, represented or not,
are given a fair shake in court.
All of the courts that I've been part of
have been very dutiful
in attempting to ensure
that the submissions of
unrepresented partners,
pro se parties, that someone in the court
is trying to read sometimes
unintelligible papers
and make sense of them, and
present the best argument
that can be presented for
the unrepresented client.
But we really have a difficult time
in explaining to people why
we don't provide lawyers.
You know, in other parts of the world,
some issues are so important
to people in the rest of the world
that issues like family law
are not state law questions,
they're federal questions.
They're federal questions
because there is a belief that,
if you believe in family values,
that that is a country issue,
that's not an individual state issue,
that that is part of your
identity as a country.
And unending in many parts of the world,
if you're gonna deprive a parent
of custody of their child,
you better give them a
lawyer, and we don't.
We have an unequal representation
of people in our court
system, and that does I think
provide an injustice that we
don't pay enough attention to.
Look, the court has recognized
a right to counsel in trials.
The constitution does not
recognize a right to counsel
in appellate work, by the way.
That's been created out
of the due process clause,
and in an indirect way.
The Supreme Court has said
we're not going to recognize
the judgments of state courts
who don't provide lawyers
to accuse defendants
or convicted defendants
in their appeals process.
So most states have done that
because they want their
judgments to stand up
in subsequent federal litigation.
But it's not an automatic
right, but we do very little
to control the quality of those lawyers,
and we're very easy as a
society to cut their pay.
Some of the worst paid lawyers
in our criminal justice system
are criminal defense lawyers,
both as federal defenders
or legal aid defenders
in the state system,
or as criminal justice attorneys
who are taking on these cases.
In the last few years,
when the federal system had a budget cut,
do you know whose pay they held up?
They held up the federal
criminal justice attorneys.
Many of them were working for free.
They're entitled to a
living too, you know.
They ultimately got paid,
but they have overhead,
and they have families like you and I,
and they're the worst paid
of any lawyer that we pay.
So we have to, as a society,
be thinking more clearly,
I think, about the principals
that are important to us as a nation.
To speak the words justice means
that with it comes responsibilities.
Responsibilities as citizens
and as participants in our society
to ensure that people accessing the courts
are given a fair and equal
opportunity to do that.
And so, for me, the lack
of legal representation
in some critical areas
is one of the things we don't do well.
- I'm gonna shift gears a little
bit with the next question,
but you've talked and written
about your experiences
coming into new contexts
and the effect that being
a person of color has had
on those experiences for you.
And I was wondering
what you've taken away from that
with respect to the value of diversity,
whether it's in social
settings, educational ones,
or professional ones and,
as a corollary to that,
whether those experiences
have shaped your views of the law.
(speaking faintly)
(audience laughs)
- How old are you?
- [Girl] I'm eight.
- Anybody under eight
gets a picture, okay?
(audience laughs)
Gotta limit it somewhere, you know?
(audience applauds)
Do you have me covered over there?
Can I turn around?
Great, then I don't
have to walk backwards.
Hello, hello.
You know, I was speaking
to a group of high school students today,
and one of them asked me
sightly different
version of your question,
which is, how has being
Latina affected my judging.
She was, I shouldn't say obviously,
but she was of Latina background.
And I said to her, I don't know...
Thank you.
I saw the Wisconsin chair, look.
We were just talking about the
cherished chair, thank you.
Thank you very much.
That is pretty.
I'm gonna see the terrace
after this finishes, okay?
Anyhow, (audience applauds)
and I said to her, I started with,
I'm a judge, but what am I first?
(audience members speaking faintly)
No, no, no.
A person.
A human being, first and foremost.
And every human being has strengths,
has weaknesses, but we learn from what?
From experience, from
study, from thinking,
from developing from babies to
adults to more senior people,
but every experience makes
us a piece of who we are.
Sonia's not just a Latina,
she's not just a woman,
she's a person who had a
Catholic school education
that brings with it
some sets of experiences
that are gonna be different
from some other people.
I was a prosecutor,
not a defense attorney.
I've been a commercial practitioner
representing big companies.
I've been a district,
a circuit court judge,
and now a Supreme Court judge.
Yes, and I am a Latina.
But in all of that mix,
there's just one me,
and there isn't one piece of me
that takes control in
judicial decision-making.
It is the experience of
learning about the law
and how to interpret the law,
of how to be a judge that I've picked up
in all the experiences that I've had,
both educational and in
life and professional,
and each one contributes
to creating a person
who thinks about life from
their various perspectives.
And each one of them makes me,
can I hand this to somebody?
(audience laughs)
And each one of them
makes it possible for me
to hear things or understand things
that others might not find so
easy to hear or understand.
So let me give you a prime example.
Rob, other justice,
okay, his first justice,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Many years ago there was a case,
I wasn't a part of it, okay,
so I'm not talking about
anything confidential
Carl Stafford involving
I think it was a 13 or 14-year old girl
within a public school who
a person who said to another person
who said to another person
was seen taking an aspirin.
This was a no-drug policy school.
She was called into the
principal's office, she said no,
the principal said, I'm gonna search you,
and they undressed her and searched her.
Her parents brought a
fourth amendment claim
about whether the school
was entitled to do this
without probable cause.
It's a technical term.
Did they have compelling evidence
that she actually took the aspirin?
In the court of law, more likely than not,
a court would say no, hearsay on hearsay,
this person who we don't know who it is
told that person who we don't who it was
told this person who we
don't know who it was,
and finally it got to the school.
We would say, before you search somebody,
you better have a little
bit more than that.
So her mother came into
court during oral argument,
and this is all part of
a public record, some of,
or one or more of my colleagues
analogized this search
as being similar to getting
undressed in a gym locker.
My colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg
was heard to say sometime after
that she believed that
her other male colleagues
did not understand how
sensitive 13-year-old girls are
about the privacy of their bodies
and may not respect how hard parents work
at ensuring that both their
male and female children
treasure their own
bodies and access to it.
There was a lot of criticism
of Justice Ginsburg's observation.
She shouldn't have said it,
blah, blah, blah, we could go on and on.
Now, why was that important?
Did it change any votes?
I doubt it.
Wasn't there, I can't tell you.
But what it avoided was a justice
writing about that experience
in the way the question was asked,
and saying, what's wrong with this girl?
Why was she traumatized by
having her body searched?
I don't believe it.
That would have been so
painful to so many girls,
and it would have been
painful to so many women.
But it wasn't said.
And so, life experiences
can sometimes avoid things
like that happening.
It does happen that justices
pick out the use of a word
that evokes images in others
that a justice with that
life experience might say,
that's really not a good
word, let's find another one.
You know, it's gonna distract
people from the opinion,
because they're gonna jump
to the wrong conclusion.
It makes a difference.
It makes a difference in
how you talk about things
and how arguments are
articulated and considered.
And so, yes, diversity to me,
not just of gender or ethnic
background or religion,
but diversity of life experiences
I believe are the most important part
of what you want to look at in judges.
I'm often on my interviewing
with 90-odd senators during
my confirmation hearing,
some of them would ask me
what do I look for when
I'm picking a judge.
And I would say to them,
look at the bench you have
and find out what parts of the
professional practice of law
are not represented,
because the more diversity in
its professional experience
and life experience that people have,
the more fulsome the conversation
will be about the law.
You can imagine that, with nine
people on the Supreme Court,
and you say, well, how can
you do that with three,
and what difference does it make
within an individual district court judge,
but that misunderstands the talk
that judges do in their opinion writing.
You know, every time I had
a question come before me,
I would read the opinions
of judges in my district,
district court judges across the country,
circuit court judges.
We educate each other
in our opinion writing.
And the greater variety of
people you have serving,
the more likely that
every side of every issue
will be engaged and will be thought about.
Doesn't mean we're gonna
rule the right way,
but we got a better shot at it, don't we,
if we have more information.
And so that to me is a critical
importance of diversity.
It gives us an opportunity
to think outside our own perspective
and to think about how other
people are experiencing
what you think is one way
and they feel is another.
It's really important to do that.
What do you all think the conversation
about the killings is about now?
A police and defendant.
It's all about learning
to listen to one another.
And so, for me, that is
the most critical part
of picking a judge,
what diversity of
experience do they believe
that will enhance the
conversation of judging?
- [Rob] Justice,
as the audience is
getting to see for itself,
you are someone who is
passionate in everything you do.
- [Sonia] I'm sorry I can't get up there,
you're too far away.
(audience laughs)
I really am.
Sorry.
I hope coming closer
helped it a little bit.
But go ahead, Rob, I'm sorry.
- So, passionate person.
I think there's no one in this room
who would disagree with that.
An area where you seem to
be particularly passionate
is criminal law, and it's an area
where you have written opinions
that have garnered a
lot of public attention.
I'm thinking, for example,
of your concurring opinion
a few years ago in
"United States vs. Jones,"
which was a case involving
GPS surveillance.
There was a dissent you wrote
earlier this year in "Utah vs. Strieff"
which involved stops by police officers
when the person they stopped is found
to have an outstanding warrant.
And I'm wondering what it
is about criminal law cases
that excites you, and
how has your experience,
whether as a prosecutor,
a district court judge,
or someone who grew up in
the environment you did
influence your thinking about those cases?
- You know, when I left being
a prosecutor in New York
I didn't wanna practice
criminal law anymore.
I purposely decided to
leave the criminal law area
and go to commercial law.
It was that I had saw in
the DA's office one morning
taking new complaints,
and I read a set of facts
and I said to myself, this is identical
to a case that I
prosecuted three years ago.
And I looked up, and it
was the same defendant
having committed the identical crime.
And I thought to myself, I'm
on the wrong end of this.
By the time defendants get to
the criminal justice system,
it's so much harder to
turn their lives around.
I don't give up the hope
that there is rehabilitation possible
for a lot of people, but it's harder.
It's much easier, a better investment,
both of my time and our
resources I think, as a nation,
to invest in kids when they're young,
to keep them away from the
temptations of the streets
than to undo the bad
that the streets create.
I've often been asked, for
those of you who read my book,
I'm a Supreme Court justice,
my 28-year-old cousin, Nelson,
who was smarter than I was by a lot,
more talented than I've ever
been, he died at 28 of AIDS.
And as I wrote my book
I was trying to think
what were the differences between us.
And it turns out that
the biggest difference
was that he was male and less
protected on the streets.
Me, I was never let alone
to walk the streets of the South Bronx,
there was always someone accompanying me.
I had my mom, my grandmother, my aunt,
but there was always an
adult to protect girls.
And I was kept busy with
after school activities
and engaged in ways that kept me
from the temptations
that existed around me.
He wasn't.
And I really think that
that's made a huge,
huge difference in the paths we took.
I had the justices ask me not so long ago,
we were sitting at lunch one day,
and one justice said to me,
"Sonia, how do we make more of you?"
(audience laughs)
Well, it's a strange question, okay?
There it is, strange question, you know?
But I said to him, I spend
a lot of time right now
at after school, supplemental
activities programs
everywhere across the country.
There is a Renaissance Center in the Bronx
that I have visited, and
I think it's marvelous,
it's called the Stem Plus Center.
They teach STEM study, but they also teach
what my cousin loved, music and arts,
to engage those students
who are involved in those activities.
Those kids go there
every day after school.
From there they go home pretty
late, and they're going home,
they're not going to
play out on the streets.
I think those kids have
the better shot at success
than the kids who are
latchkey kids like me
and whose parents can't
or don't have a mechanism
to have their children watched.
And so I worked with one
of those programs in DC.
It mentors kids in high school
by giving them an adult mentor.
I have a few, I didn't
participate in this one,
you guys were around, but I
have a few former law clerks
who are now part of the program.
And they meet with a tutor once a week
to help them in the subjects
they're having difficulty with.
The tutor is like a big
sister or big brother
and introduces them to activities
they might not otherwise be familiar with
and encourages them to go to college.
This program has 100% success rate
of getting their kids into
college with scholarships.
And I'm convinced it's
because someone who knows
is paying attention to those kids.
And now they started, and I was very proud
of being a part of this
movement in the program,
they're doing Skyping once a week
with the kids in college
to keep them in college.
And the two years that
they've run the Skyping,
none of the kids have left college.
So we have to pay more attention
to activities of these
natures to keep our kids off.
Now, that hasn't answered your question,
Rob, I'm getting there.
(audience laughs)
I'm getting there, all right?
Linda Greenhouse, who was
a reporter on the court
for many, many years, and she
was with the "New York Times."
She's now teaching at Yale Law School.
Linda and I had a conversation
at my alma mater, Yale,
a number of years back, and she asked me,
what was the difference
between me and Justice Elena?
We were both district court judges,
I was a district court judge,
we were both circuit court judges,
we'd both come from ivy league schools.
Why am I willing to be more
pro-defendant than he is?
Our voting records show
that he almost inevitably votes
in favor of the government
in criminal law cases,
and I don't always vote against
the government, by the way.
There's a lot of cases
where I vote in favor of the government,
but there are some that are
more noteworthy than others
where I have not agreed
with the government.
And I said to him, as I
thought about it, not to him,
to Linda, and I thought about
the question and I said,
I think it's the nature of
the prosecutorial work we do.
If you're a federal prosecutor,
you have a lot of resources,
you have a standard of
prosecution that has been set
through generations of high
integrity and real care,
and I think most people
in the federal system
come away with a great respect
for the safeguards that are
built into the federal system,
federal criminal system.
In the state system you try your cases
by the seat of your pants.
(audience laughs)
There are so many cases,
so little resources.
Often, prosecutors are
meeting their witnesses
in the hallway before the jury comes in.
Many times you haven't had time
to do the background checks
that you should be doing.
You rely on a good defense
attorney coming to you
and telling you, you got
this weakness, look at it.
And sometimes when you do that,
you actually stop a moment,
take a deep breath and
go out, and look at it,
and find out, ah ha, he's
right, or she's right.
But you can't do that
when you're overwhelmed
with so many cases and there's
so many hours in a day.
Most state prosecutors
are working long hours,
weekends and nights.
I was.
But with that kind of lack of resources
and press of business, which
affects not just your office
but the police force who's
investigating their cases,
you're more willing when
you've been a state prosecutor
to understand that the
system can fail sometimes,
that the checks that we put
in against police excess,
against unfair treatments of
those defendants are necessary
to perfect our criminal law system.
They're not evils that have
to unshackle the police
from doing their work, they
are measures that exist
because we're trying to
make our system fair.
We're trying to ensure
that as few innocent people
are convicted as we can manage
at an imperfect life situation.
You know, my colleague
Justice Scalia used to say
every system is fallible.
Some innocent people are gonna go to jail.
He's right.
But you have to try to
ensure that you minimize that
as much as you humanly can
without completely hobbling the process.
And so I am getting to my answer, Rob.
(audience laughs)
And so, for me, I've been a judge
both on the district court,
but even as a prosecutor,
who really believes in the process
that through the ages the
Supreme Court has created.
The protections in place
I know, I feel deeply,
that we have recognized and
passed, not passed as a court,
but recognized as a court,
have been important
safeguards to the system.
And so I'm a great,
great believer in the court's precedence,
both as a district
court, court of appeals,
and now as a Supreme Court Justice,
I let those precedents guide
me in my decision-making.
And if you read those dissents
that Rob's talking about,
most people are talking about
the last part of the dissents,
of my dissents where I'm
talking from my personal
professional experiences,
many of them miss the point
of the first two-thirds part.
The first two-thirds part
are explaining what the
law has actually been.
It's what I did in my
affirmative action dissent,
what I've done in this
dissent he's talking about,
I show what the court has said.
I show what the court has done.
I point to what I think are
misstatements by the majority
or mischaracterizations of precedent.
I am not ruling from some personal feeling
that this is the right thing to do,
I'm using our precedents and
saying this is what we've done,
this is what we have said,
this is not the time to change it.
And I haven't been
successful, (audience laughs)
but it does guide me in
deciding when I should speak out
and point put the negative
practical consequences
of decisions the courts are rendering.
I do believe that law serves people,
and to the extent it does,
there are moments where I have written
and said I don't like the
decision I'm rendering,
I think it's a bad policy choice,
but it's not a choice for me to make.
And so I'm writing for
Congress or for the public
in the hope that they
will galvanize themselves
to change what I think is
a bad policy or a bad term.
But when the court is taking one,
then I can say something orals.
And I really do think that as
a judge I had an obligation.
In every ruling I make, it's that question
of how burdened I feel
to understand the impact
of the decisions I made.
And don't ever doubt that I
understand the good and the bad,
but I decide I must, because
that's what judges do.
But in criminal law, we are
taking away people's freedom,
and that has a big consequence,
I think more than a monetary loss.
Now, there's some people
who would disagree with that balance,
but for me, the loss of your freedom
is perhaps the most valuable
treasure we each own.
And so that's an area where
I'm more, not more likely,
but where articulating the other
side seems important to me.
I answered your question, right?
- You did.
- Okay. (audience laughs)
- So you've referenced a couple of times
your former colleague, Justice Scalia,
and his passing was one
of the biggest events
of the previous term at the court.
He was--
- [Sonia] It may still be a big
event this coming year, too.
(audience laughs)
- He was one of the court's
most prominent and outspoken members,
he was a fellow New Yorker
and fellow Yankees fan.
- Ah, I feel so guilty.
He was so upset that I was
embraced as the Yankee fan,
'cause he was one too, but
people didn't recognize as much.
And I kept saying to him,
I was born in the Bronx,
you were born in Queens.
What do you think people are gonna think?
(audience laughs)
(audience applauds)
But I had promised him that
I would go to a baseball,
Yankee baseball game, and somehow
we never got it organized.
And I'm really sorry about that.
I did take Maureen, his wife,
and one of his granddaughters and her mom
who loved the nationals to a
nationals game this past year.
So, doesn't make up for what I didn't do.
It reminded me that,
if there are special things
you wanna do in life,
don't put them off.
And what's a lesson
we all have to keep in mind all the time.
- [Rob] Well, you've
already been answering
my question without me even
having to ask it (laughs)
but I wonder if you could reflect
just a little bit more on
your relationship with him
and maybe on how his loss has
been felt within the court.
- Deeply, deeply.
I told the story earlier
to the law school faculty,
and some of them are gonna hear it again.
We had a public service at
the Court for Justice Scalia,
and in the Great Hall,
which is the hall in front
of the courtroom doors,
and it's a long hallway,
each side of the hallway
there are pillars holding
up the upper floors,
but in between the
pillars are marble casts
of all the chief justices of the court.
It's a very moving space.
You walk into it and you're sort of struck
with the solidity and
the sense of importance
of this historical building.
His law clerks, of which
there were over 100
because he had served I
think 25 years on the court,
26, so four times,
there's about 100 or more,
he had some in the courts
below, they lined the staircases
as his casket was carried up the stairs
by an honor guard of Supreme
Court police officers.
The justices entered the hall
before his body came
rolling in or walked in,
and there was a portrait
of him at the front.
As we walked out, I heard justices
gasping and choking.
When I got to the front,
'cause I was one of the senior justices,
I could look behind as my
colleagues followed me,
and I saw tears just
about everybody's eyes.
He was obviously closer to
some people than to others,
as we can't have eight equal friends,
okay, it's hard. (audience laughs)
But what was unusual about
him is that his friends
weren't of one similar
judicial philosophy to him.
Him and Ruth Bader Ginsburg
who hardly, if ever,
voted together, were best of friends.
Her husband and his
wife, Maureen and Marty,
they traveled together.
There's a famous picture
of them sitting on camels.
Could you ever imagine Ruth Bader Ginsburg
and Nino Scalia on camels?
(audience laughs)
They loved the opera and
they would go together.
They often sat in the chorus behind,
I don't know what that's called,
shows you how interested I
am, or lesser interest I have.
But they get people from
the normal walks of life
to play sort of spectators
on the stage in the opera,
and they loved doing that.
Nino led Christmas carols
at our Christmas parties.
He'd break into ditties when
someone would say something
that would bring up an old
song he had heard decades ago.
I said to the faculty this morning
that at first I thought
I was very ignorant.
There's a lot of these
songs I had never heard.
And then Elena Kagan came and I would say,
have you heard that song, and
she said no. (audience laughs)
Made me feel better, okay?
But Ruth and Steve Breyer
who were closer in age than Nino
often had heard the songs,
and you could see the
comradery they shared.
It's a big hole in the court.
The court is quieter,
it's not as lively as it
was with his presence.
We feel his absence.
The hardest thing I
think for every one of us
was walking into that courtroom
that first week of arguments
where his chair was draped in black.
I sat at one end at the time,
and often during argument,
you know, maybe you don't know,
the bench is bowed, because
for many decades it was straight
and justices could not see
each other from end to end.
So at a certain point
they changed the shape
so that we can actually look down the line
and see each other.
And my favorite view was
looking at Nino making faces.
(audience laughs)
I try not to emulate him, but I must say,
it was fun to watch.
And I could always know
what he was thinking by...
(audience laughs)
I'm making a face for those
who can't see it, okay?
Or the big smile that would come
before he was gonna lay into a lawyer.
(audience laughs)
you know, you're laughing,
but this makes for engagement.
It made for excitement.
In one event I said he was like a brother.
There were many, many
annoying things he did.
Sometimes he said some things where
I wanted to jump up with a baseball bat
and hit him over the head.
(audience laughs)
But he was always interesting,
and that holds a lot for a court,
that our nature is
gonna have disagreement.
It's hard to get unanimity
among nine people,
and it shouldn't be easy.
If you understand
that the cases you take have
created a circuit split,
then you have to
understand that, by nature,
the questions we're facing are hard.
If they were easy, all of
the courts below would agree.
A circuit split means that
there's arguments on both sides
and that reasonable judges on each side
have been convinced by a
different set of arguments.
And so it shouldn't be an
expectation that the Supreme Court
is more reasonable than all
of those other judges below,
or that we possess some magical power
that can tell us what
Congress was thinking.
No, we're playing sort of detective,
we're trying to figure out
what the Congress meant
in laws that passed,
and that requires a set of
interpretory bolts, tools
that we're all using.
But you know, if you
start building a house
with a saw, you're gonna
get one kind of house
than if you start building
a house without nails
or that you've cut in a different way.
It's gonna have a different
look, and so the tools,
we all use the same toolbox,
but in what order we use
those tools of interpretation,
how we approach that construction
or deconstruction project
will often lead to different results.
I think it's more surprising
when we agree than when we disagree.
- So I think we have time
for just one more question,
and I'm gonna go ahead
and sneak two in there.
(audience laughs)
You've said before that no
one succeeds by themselves,
and you've been generous,
both in talking about those
who have mentored you,
and then mentoring others who
have come across your path.
And so my first question is,
can you tell us a little bit
about one mentorship experience
with one of your mentors
that been particularly important to you
and stands out among the others?
And second, putting on your mentor hat,
what advice would you give
to those in the audience,
particularly the aspiring
and new lawyers among us?
Remember who Lindsey
worked for before me, okay,
because I think she's heard
me say this story before.
I think I have been mentored
by many extraordinary judges in my career,
but there's one in particular
that probably changed the
course of my life on the court,
and that's Justice John Paul Stevens
and the one year we overlapped.
One of the things I did that first year
was of keep track as I read
the cert petition memos
that came from our law groups
about all the petitions
to review cases that
passed through the court,
and I would make a list of the
ones that were troubling me.
Each justice can add to the discuss,
the chief's discuss list.
He lists all the cases he
thinks we should talk about.
And then the next day or the day after,
each justice can list those cases
he or she thinks should be
talked about, so the list grows.
If you're a new justice,
sometimes it's pretty hard
to figure out what you
should talk about or not.
You haven't been there, you
haven't had the experience.
And that first year the person
I chose to be my barometer
was John Paul Stevens,
and the reason was that,
very often, the cases that
he listed on the discuss list
were cases that had given me pause,
but I hadn't been brave enough to list.
And then, occasionally,
I would have a case that
I'd need to see him with,
and I would pull him up and say,
John, what's important about this case?
It didn't seem that unusual to me.
And he would explain it to
me, and most often than not
I would say to him, you know, John,
I understand why you think it's important,
but I don't think others are gonna agree.
It doesn't have this or that.
And he would say to me, Sonia,
I know when I list cases
that I won't often get
people to agree with me.
Often it's really unpopular
cases that I'm listing
just because you should talk about them.
There are issues that
we should think about,
even if we're not gonna vote
to grab them at this time.
And so, then, it's okay
to be a solo voice.
Sometimes people have to speak as judges
issues that need to be articulated
even if other people don't agree with you.
That advice probably led
and leads to the many dissents I write
where I don't get a lot
of people to join me.
He gave me the courage to understand
that some things just
have to be thought about,
that some things have to
be discussed, considered,
accepted or rejected,
but that the views have
to be thought about.
And so he changed the course
of what I became as a justice,
and for me I think it was
the most valuable freedom
he could've given me.
So what do I look for
in, and I was a mentee,
what did I look for in mentors?
I looked for them to be
more skilled than I was,
doing things that I didn't know how to do,
teaching me things I
wanted to learn more about
and become better at.
I also understood that most mentors,
because they're good at things,
you're gonna look for people
that are good at something,
right, they're really busy.
And the only way to get
the attention of mentors,
particularly a busy law
firm, busy government jobs,
et cetera, is by helping them,
volunteering, helping them
research an issue that's
important to them,
helping them think about a new problem
and giving them a different perspective,
site checking their articles.
When I was in private practice
I was working with a
lawyer I greatly admired,
but I didn't really like his work,
and I wanted to work for someone else
who was doing work I wanted.
So for about a year I
was working two jobs.
It then took that second year
for the partner who I wanted to work with
to say to the other
partner, I'm taking her.
That happens a lot.
You end up working for someone
who's not your ideal match.
Well, you may have to volunteer
and work a little bit harder
at nights and weekends
with the person you wanna work with,
with the professor you wanna work for,
so that you can become their mentee.
Being a mentee requires you to work.
You'll have to be wont to take
advantage of the situation,
and you'll have to show your mentor
that you're willing to
work as hard as they are.
They're gonna go every mile
necessary to learn, to grow,
to appreciate the time
they're spending with you,
and to make that time valuable
for yourself and for them.
And so I have never forgotten
to be grateful to my mentors.
They spent time on me, they
gave me their attention.
Most importantly, they taught me
how to be better at what I do,
and that's the greatest gift
any of us can ever receive,
improving ourselves both as professionals
and as human beings.
Because I often found mentors,
and that was a big necessity for me,
whose integrity I respected.
And so I hope that that
advice will be useful to you.
I know that looking for
those people who did things
in a better way than I could
was always a really good
qualification for finding a mentor.
Okay, are you through,
or are you gonna ask
another question, you guys?
- [Lindsey] We would love
to keep going, but. (laughs)
- [Sonia] I'm through, you're
stopping me? (chuckles)
(audience applauds)
(speaking faintly)
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
(audience applauding drowns out voice)
I'm taking off these shoes
as soon as I leave here.
- And I'll be right
behind you, Your Honor.
(audience laughs)
One of the great pleasures
that I have as Dean,
or at least today, was to
follow Justice Sotomayor
to the substantial array of events
that she has done on this campus.
She is tireless, she has given
generously of her time and,
in all of the opportunities
she has had to interact
with our communities,
she has shown herself to
be brilliant and relatable,
compassionate and judicious,
and critical and hopeful
all at the same time.
I think she's given all of us
a lot to think about and mull over,
and we want to express our
tremendous gratitude to her
for spending her day with us.
(audience applauds)
We also have a gift for
you, Justice Sotomayor.
When they knocked down the
old law school building,
they salvaged one of the
gargoyles from the building,
and this is a replica of the gargoyle.
It's a symbol of the University
of Wisconsin Law School,
it's very meaningful
to anybody who has one.
I guarantee you nobody
else in the Supreme Court
has one of these. (audience laughs)
And they tell me it
grows on you with time.
I've got five years in
and so far, no, but...
(laughs)
- Thank you
Oh my, very impressive.
(applause drowns out voice)
Thank you very, very much.
- Thank you so much
(applause drowns out voice).
Thanks to all of you for coming.
Have a good evening.
- [Sonia] Good evening.
(audience applauding)
