Urban Legends - Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor
There she stood, fielding questions from endorsers and detractors alike in the Senate Judiciary Committee during day 1 (Jul. 13) of her confirmation hearings. It’s the part of the process when those nominated by a U.S. president for a position within the federal govt. have their feet held to the fire by having to answer questions about their past that could unearth potentially damaging information.
A President Clinton appointed judge on the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
since 1998, Sonia Sotomayor had to answer
for a line in a 2001 lecture (“A Latina Judge’s
Voice”) she gave at the University of California,
Berkeley, School of Law which read, “ ...
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with
the richness of her experiences would more
often than not reach a better conclusion than
a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
The remark surfaced following her nomination
on May 26, drawing an uproar from
the political right - many of whom labeled it “racist” and indicative of an extremely liberal
judge whose interpretation of the law would
be strictly guided by her own sociological
background, which clearly scares the crap
out of them.
Sotomayor’s time on the Second Circuit was mostly known for her ruling in the Ricci v. DeStefano case. In that dispute, Frank Ricci, a white fire fighter, sued the city of New Haven, Conn. and its mayor, John DeStefano, for throwing out the results of a promotional exam, thus keeping him and 19 others (18 whites, 1 Hispanic) from getting promoted to either captain or lieutenant. The content of the test, the city alleged, was such that Afro-Americans and Latinos were less likely to pass, thus assuring that they would rarely, if ever, attain promotion. Eventually, the case made it up to judges Sotomayor, Robert Sack and Rosemary Pooler, who ruled against the “Newhaven 20.” The decision, however, was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Ct. (5 to 4) finally enabling the fire fighters to get promoted.
That case, like the “wise Latina” remark,
was a point of contention, but her poise,
vast knowledge of American legal history
and its nomenclature enabled her to avoid
being backed into a corner. She handled
herself very skillfully while getting grilled, but
also cooled tensions by conceding that her
words could’ve been chosen more carefully
during her lecture, eventually citing that her
only intention was to inspire burgeoning Latino
law students to be proud of their heritage.
Ultimately, the U.S. Senate voted 68-31 in
favor of Sotomayor on Aug. 6, and she was
sworn in on the 8th, making her the first ever
Hispanic U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
“For someone to be selected to this position,
having gone through all of that, she’s
someone who did something, una Boricua,”
Latino Sports founder Julio Pabon told
Time.com.
Born to Puerto Rican natives Juan Sotomayor
and Celina Baez, of Santurce and
Lajas, respectively, on June 25, 1954, in
the Bronx, New York, Sonia Maria Sotomayor
spent her early childhood in a South
Bronx tenement before he family moved to
the Soundview section of the borough. As
if coming up poor in the Bronxdale Housing
projects wasn’t hard enough, the young
Sotomayor’s will was further tested at ages 8 and 9, when during that one year span she
was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes, and
suffered the loss of her father, Juan, who
died of heart complications.
By this time she was receiving daily insulin
shots to treat her condition, but she’d find
serenity with the Mickey Mantle-led New
York Yankees of the early ‘60s, as well as her
family’s annual visits to Puerto Rico, where
they spent their summers. There was also
actor Raymond Burr’s portrayal of the title
character in “Perry Mason,” a serial crime
drama that ran from 1957 to 1966. Mason,
an L.A. defense attorney, had a very real,
profound effect on the psyche of a young
Sotomayor, who knew at age 10 that she
wanted to practice law. The chaos caused
by heroine and violent crime pervading the
Afro-American and Latino communities
further strengthened that desire to make a
positive change in the inner city.
On full scholarship, she made off to Princeton University, but the culture shock of being in an Ivy League school with less than two dozen Latinos, and an upper class setting compelled Sotomayor, a history major, to study harder in between her first and second year.
As a sophomore, she began to raise questions
about the hiring practices at Princeton,
as there were no Latinos among the university’s
faculty; and the curriculum, which
neglected to cover anything related to Latin
America. Her voice was heard on both issues;
Sotomayor penned an opinion piece
that prompted the university to hire Latinos,
and history professor Peter Winn created a
seminar on Puerto Rican history and politics.
After graduating summa cum laude in
1976, Sotomayor landed at Yale Law School.
While there, she was involved in an incident
at a recruiting dinner during which she was
told by the law firm, Shaw, Pittman, Potts &
Trowbridge, that she was a product of affirmative
action. Incensed by this, Sotomayor,
then 24, filed a formal complaint to Yale’s’
student-faculty tribunal, which issued a ruling
in her favor.
The law firm issued an apology, which was
published by the Washington Post in Dec.
1978. In 1979, Yale Law School awarded her
a Juris Doctor, and in 1980, she joined the N.
Y. State Bar Association. She began working
as an assistant D.A. in New York County to
D.A. Robert Morgenthau (elected in 1974)–
who actually retired this fall.
Sotomayor’s time there was highlighted
by her involvement in the conviction of Robert
Maddick, dubbed the “Tarzan Killer,” in
1983. More often, however, she would deal
with crimes more prevalent in poorer neighborhoods,
which took her back to her days
as a kid, when she decided to make a difference.
“I had more problems during my first year
in the office with the low-grade crimes -- the
shoplifting, the prostitution, the minor assault
cases,” she told the NY Times during
a 1983 interview. “In large measure, in those
cases you were dealing with socioeconomic
crimes, crimes that could be the product of
the environment and of poverty. Once I started
doing felonies, it became less hard. No matter
how liberal I am, I’m still outraged by crimes of
violence.”
In ‘84, she left public service to practice privately
out of her Brooklyn apartment, and from
1980 to 1992, she served on the boar of directors
on the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and
Education Fund. On a recommendation from
then U.S. Senator Daniel Moynihan (D-NY), in
Nov. 1991 she was nominated by president
George H.W. Bush to serve on the N.Y. District
Court for the Southern District of N.Y.
There, she became linked to Baseball history
by issuing a court order towards the owners of
every MLB franchise, which ended the 1994
baseball strike by preventing the owners from
proceeding with replacement players in lieu
of non-MLB union players (virtually the whole
league) under their terms.
On Saturday, Sept. 26, the life-long Yankee fan visited the new stadium to throw out the ceremonial first pitch before a Yankees versus Red Sox game. Sporting the famed pinstripe jersey, Justice Sotomayor channeled that little girl inside her - the 10-year-old from the Bronx against all the odds - focused on the target (Jose Molina), and threw a strike. What’s so profound about that moment is how she took it all in; you knew, as she was winding up to throw the ball, that she was living yet another dream.
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