Hello everybody. Well, welcome everyone. I'm
thrilled that you'll be able to join us today for this discussion with the Honorable Sonia
Sotomayor, associate justice of the Supreme Court and Chancellor Andrew Martin. Washington
University student Sarah Del Carmen Camacho and I will have the distinct pleasure to
introduce our two guests on stage with us today. Sarah is a third-year student majoring in global
studies and educational studies with a minor in Chinese language. She is an Annika Rodriguez
scholar and a Mellon Mays undergraduate fellow. Sarah, or Sarita as her friends call her, is
proud to have been born and raised in the Bay area as the child of Nicaraguan refugees.
When she's not in class, you may find Sarah in a rehearsal or on stage for WashU
Student Theater and Performing Arts Department, most recently performing in “Rent.” She also
volunteers for WashU’s co-ed LatinX interest fraternity, Alpha Psi Lambda and is
an alum of Lock and Chain honorary. Thank you, Dr. Gonzalez. I am overjoyed to be with
you today. For all of you who don't know Dr. G, she is the vice chancellor for student affairs
and joined our campus community last summer. With over 30 years’ experience in higher
education, she has held previous positions at the University of California, Irvine, the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Lewis and Clark College and Harvey Mudd College.
Dr. G’s research interests are focused on first generation students, equity and diversity and
more. She has a particular commitment to fostering diversity and inclusion in all aspects of student
life. Immediately after I met Dr. G I called my mom and told her how happy I was that Dr. G and
I could bond over our shared love of fluffy dogs, and even nerd out and talk about research. As I've
gotten to know her, I appreciate her humor, her genuine interest in students and her commitment
to make change for the betterment of students. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you so much. Now it is my
indeed my great pleasure to introduce our guest and who I'm going to introduce,
and really many of us already know him, is our chancellor, Chancellor Andrew D. Martin. The chancellor is actually an alum of WashU,
earning his doctorate in political science, and was a distinguished, and still is a distinguished
member of the faculty, leaving WashU for a little bit to go to Michigan to be an administrator and
now back here to be our chancellor. He has been a champion for all of us, and in particular when
he announced the Gateway to Success, a historic $1 billion dollar investment in student financial
aid for undergraduate, graduate and professional students. This allowed us to implement a
need-blind undergraduate admissions model in which an applicant's ability to pay will never
be a factor. He truly believes deeply that there is no such thing as excellence without diversity
and is committed to making WashU the best college in the nation for supporting student success
regardless of background or previous opportunity. Just fyi that he does, I think that what I'd love
to actually tell all of you and I told him I would say this, is deep down inside he is really
geeking out because his research is actually on the Supreme Court, and I know that he is super
excited to be up here on stage with Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Thank you, Dr.
Gonzalez. It is now my pleasure to introduce U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Born in Bronx, New York, Justice Sotomayor earned
a bachelor of arts degree in 1976 from Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude and
receiving the university's highest academic honor. In 1979, she earned a law degree from
Yale Law School where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She served as an assistant
district attorney in the New York County District Attorney's office for five years after graduating
law school. She then litigated international commercial matters in New York City. In 1991,
President George H.W. Bush nominated her to U.S. District Court Southern District of New York
and she served in that role from 1992 to 1998. She then served as a judge on the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1998 to 2009. President Barack Obama nominated her
as an associate justice for the Supreme Court on May 26, 2009 assuming the role August 8, 2009.
As we welcome Justice Sotomayor, I want to share a few personal remarks. Justice Sotomayor's visit to
Washington University is special to me because it is her success and her determination as a justice
first generation college student and Latina that has given me and my peers the hope to pursue our
dreams and the model to do so. Though she may have been an image on a vision board for a 10-year-old
me, her visit today is a reminder that champions for justice are real. For the entire WashU student
body, today's visit from Justice Sotomayor is a testament to how fortunate we are to be learning
at an institution that has a legacy of engaging with the world and bringing fantastic guests
to speak with us. Thank you, Justice Sotomayor, for being with us today for your first, though
hopefully not your only, visit to WashU. Well, thank you very much Sarah, thank you very
much. Dr. G. Isn't this something! It's amazing. All of you should know that he had prepared about
16 questions and they were all so good I didn't even know what to tell you you should ask, so I’m
going to be as surprised as all of you are by what questions he picks, okay? Well, before we jump
in, I just want to welcome everyone. I mean this is such an extraordinary event for our university,
at a complicated time in our university's history and in our nation's history, and on behalf
of all the students, the faculty and staff, we are so pleased that you are with us today.
And, I also want to thank all of the people who made this possible; your office, all of our
security folks, our events team, everybody in student affairs, this was an extraordinary
team effort and I'm so proud of the way in which our teams have pulled together to make this
possible. And, of course I want to thank you. I deserve the least thanks. They have done
two-and-a-half of the most complicated multi-event functions that I've seen put together. You have
a fabulous team. We have a wonderful team here. And a very generous and gracious guest, so
why don't we why don't we jump right in? So, when writing about your achievements and
your academic and professional trajectories, it seems that over and over again
chance encounters with the right people are met with deep self-awareness to launch you
into the next step. Can you share how you come about possessing such a deep self-awareness and
is this something you think people can cultivate? Yes. I in answer to the last part of
your question, I do think it's something that people can cultivate. I think
it starts largely with self-honesty. You know, most of us are defensive
about our weaknesses because they hurt. No one likes admitting that they feel they
can't do something or can't do something well. It's very hard to come to terms with that
internally, and so one of the things that I have cultivated in my life is licking my wounds when
things don't go right. Because you have to cry a little bit over it and it's all right to have a
little bit of self-pity when it happens because it is sad. But I try very hard after it, decide to
try to sit down and analyze the situation without looking at the part that others played because
it's all too easy to ascribe fault to others, and it's much harder to look at yourself
and say what part did I play in this? What am I missing in who and what I do that I
need to improve? So that leads me to what you describe as chance encounters, I describe as
those moments where I meet someone who I see acting and doing things that I admire but
I'm not sure that I can do, and so I'm always looking for mentors and for role models.
Just give me guidance about how to improve myself. And so in each situation those people
enter my life and I immediately am able to recognize their strengths and
understand that I can learn from them, and I think that’s the thing that people can learn
how to do, which is to understand what they need to learn and then to look for the situations
and the people who can help them do that. Obviously, my answer is underscoring how
important I think it is to seek out mentors, but I also think it's critically important for every
person to be able to say the words, I don't know. I often use the example that I was always one
of those students in class, that if a teacher was talking too fast or was explaining something
in a way I didn't understand, I was the first one to raise my hand and say, “Please slow down,
I'm not sure what you're saying, back up.” And everybody in the classroom would shake their head,
yes. But that is what often happens in rooms, people are talking and others are listening
but not willing to admit that they don't know, and that's a skill, thankfully, that I
learned which has been a mantra, to be open about what I don't know. That's terrific
advice. So, let me ask you a question about your family. You know, you've written… your story
is filled with lessons learned from your family, particularly your mother, Selena, your paternal
abuelita, Mercedes, both of whom were raised in poverty and built new lives after leaving
Puerto Rico for the Bronx. I understand that they were two very different women. Can you share
a bit about each of them, and the most valuable lesson you learned from each of them? Ah, there's
so many. During my nomination process, everybody was focused on my mother. She was there and next
to me, and after a taping at the White House for a video that they were going to put on the
Internet, my mother and I were walking out and she said, “Sonia, why is nobody talking
about Mercedes?” Mercedes was my abuelita, my grandmother, and I said, “Mommy,
because she's not here, but I promise you that they will learn about her.” That's one of
the reasons I wrote my book, “My Beloved World.” You learned both about my grandmother and
my mother in that book. So, my grandmother, even though I am physically the complete
opposite of my grandmother -- she was a very slight woman, very long
face, I have a round face -- she and I differed in our looks completely,
but my mother has always said that I am more my grandmother's daughter
than her own real daughters. And in the sense of, my grandmother
was a poet, she loved reciting poetry and at family parties while we still had them,
which was before my father died, every Saturday night my father and my grandmother, at the end of
the evening would do a poetry slam. One would get up and start reciting some poetry, the other one
would get up and counter it with something else, and they'd go back and forth and I remember as
a child hiding under the table listening to it, not fully understanding the metaphors or what
was being said but appreciating the beauty of it, the richness of it. My social nature is my
grandmother. My grandmother loved parties and she was the center of every party because
she organized them, she got people up to dance, she had them reciting poetry, she had them
playing instruments, she loved to cook. All of the things that my grandmother loved
I loved. I was her favorite grandchild. My cousins, and I'm very close to one
of them, my cousin, Miriam whom I adore, says that everybody knew it and nobody
was really jealous because I was so much like her that they understood the connection.
But my grandmother really taught me about family, and not immediate family because what my mother
taught me about, grandmother taught me about, was your largest extending to extended family. That
it was a circle of friends that you surrounded yourself with that gave meaning to your life. And
so, our parties were not just relatives, it was people that they had known from Puerto Rico, it
was the in-laws of people that were married into the family, it was strangers that my grandmother
had picked up and just invited to join us, and that sense of family, of community, started
with my grandmother. My mother picked that up. Some of you may not know that I lost my mother
in June -- in July actually, July 25th. It was a hard year last year, losing her. From anyone who's
read my memoir you'll know how close I was to her. This was a horrific loss for me, and during
her memorial service when I spoke about everything my mother was, all of my
friends afterwards came up to me and said, “You're just reciting the best things in
you,” and I was so complimented by that. My mother had a spirit like no other I've ever
known. First of all, she believed that education was the key to opportunity, that anything
you wanted to be you could be so long as you educated yourself. She went to college
when she was in her late 40s -- early 50s. Imagine me and my brother sitting at our
kitchen table with our mother at the other part of the table studying, and my brother
and I would quit and my mother would stay in the room still studying. With that kind
of example, we couldn't slack off in school and we didn't, but more important to my mother
was her commitment to people, and mom was the local community nurse. Every stranger in
the neighborhood that had a medical problem, they would come running at our door. I can't
tell you the number of times I would open the door and say hello, and somebody would introduce
themselves as coming from a different floor in the building or across in another building,
and explaining that a friend of a friend had told them about my mother and they were having
a medical issue, and I would say, “That's okay,” and I go get my mother, okay? I often tell the
story of being nominated for the Court of Appeals and having the Senate vote, and trying to reach
my mother to watch television. And this is before we had cell phones, okay, so I'm calling my
mother from the office literally the entire day. Late afternoon, I finally get her, I tell her
what happened and I said, “Where have you been?” and her answer was, well, you know this
neighbor, I had to take her to the doctor today. That was a common explanation by
my mother. It's never for money; it was out of a sense of civic
participation and that she passed on to me. I truly am engaged with and devoted to inspiring
all of you in this audience to understand how important your obligation is to participate
in bettering the world. It should be your number one goal in whatever
passion you find for work. Now it doesn't have to be being a lawyer,
it doesn't have to be service as a doctor, service is anything you create, service by
how you turn your life into making the world a place that others can feel included and
helped. And it doesn't matter what job you do, every single occupation can do good. It's the
way you do it, the love that you have for it, the ways you look for ensuring that
whether you're an accountant, a bus driver, or chancellor of a university or a Supreme
Court justice, anything you do, you have a duty to go out there and try to better the world. I belong to the ICivics. organization started
by my colleague, Sandra Day O’Connor, and ICivics.org teaches middle school children
about civics through video games. ICivics has grown and it's now doing lesson
plans for high schoolers and college students. It's also involved in a national program going on
across the country to reintroduce civic education across in each of the states, and Missouri should
be one of those that undertakes that effort, and I'm challenging somebody
in this audience to think about how to get your state to make civic education a
part of its curriculum, because it's so critical to the survival of our republican form of
government, but so critical to the health of every community. But having said that, and
going back to my mom, she taught me that. And finally, like my grandmother, my mother
taught me to look at the good in people. You know, my mother had friends
that never stopped talking, and I, after they would leave, I'd look at my
mother and make eyes at her and say, “How can you stand it, it's like non-stop, Mommy,” and she
would turn to me and she would say, “Aye, Sonia, jo se, I know, but you know they’re such a
kind-hearted person, you know the good she does for x y and z, she really, you know she's
lonely so she needs to talk; I can listen." Any fault that you found in another person,
my mother would always talk about a virtue. She refused to define people by their faults, she refused to define them by their political
views, by something they did that she didn't like, myself included. I knew my mother loved me no
matter what, even when I wasn't patient with her. That's a great security blanket to have, not
only as a child but as a friend of my mother's, and I'm not as virtuous as she is, I
don't forgive quite as easily as she did, but I try. And so, those are the qualities that
my grandmother and my mother passed on to me and I think that they define who I am, I
hope, as a person. What a wonderful legacy. So, before I invite our students to come and ask
them… Well, you know that it's my time now to go down and walk around… You're going to walk it,
I'm going to ask you a question about politics while you walk because you're an opportunity…
Can I stop and give one… the guys up here, the big guys you know, with stuff around their waist
and things, they're here to protect you from me. I do things they don't like,
including walking in the audience. I thank you for wearing masks because
that gives me the opportunity to walk among you safely, so thank you for doing that, but
also, they get nervous if you get up unexpectedly. If I call you up they know it and they're
calm, but please don't get up without my sort of lifting you up, okay? Please don't make
them nervous, all right? Now, all right, let's talk about politics. Go ahead. So our students
have entered adulthood in a time of extreme political polarization. Your formative years took
place during the American Civil Rights Movement and during the Vietnam War. As someone with an
early and profound sense of justice, how did you engage with these issues as a young woman and
do you have words of wisdom for our young people on how to navigate the polarized discourse
that is inescapable today in their lives? It isn't easy. I live in a polarized world in
Washington. You see it on TV among politicians and it's never ending now, and there's a lot
of screaming between people and among people, and it's sometimes very hard to get
past that ding you know? It sort of gets into your head, doesn't it? Some
of the people I'm hugging I know, okay? I have two law clerks who are from
St. Louis. They're sitting right here and their parents are here, so
I'm giving them hugs, how's that? But my answer harkens back to
the lesson that I just described that my mother taught me, and that is
I try, for example, with my colleagues with whom I have very divergent views,
with many probably the majority right now, I try very, very hard to see the good in them
because I know there's good in every one of them. Justice Souter once said to me, when he realized
that all of his colleagues, particularly the ones he disagreed with, were people who believed as
passionately as he did in the Constitution and our system of government and the laws of
our country, that it became easier for him to not get so angry with them, to let it go. And
I realized that that was what my mother taught me, which is, you're going to differ in views
with people and some of the views are going to be or feel offensive to you. I mean,
issues, the sensitive issues around racism, can be very, very hard, particularly if you feel
someone's attacking your integrity as a person or your worth as a person. You know, it isn't so
easy. When I was being nominated, people said that I wasn't smart enough to be on the Supreme Court.
That hurt me, cut me to the quick, and I realized, you know, coming from Princeton with the honors I
received there, going to Yale, doing fairly well, being a District Court judge and a Circuit Court
judge, it felt like, what's enough, and when is it enough, okay? And really, the reality is
that for some people, if you're a minority, particularly one from New York, they believe
that affirmative action opened the door for you. They forget that you don't judge
a person by who opens the door, you judge them by what they did when
they went through the door, all right? That does get forgotten in the conversations and they're hurtful, but you can't write
people off because of what they don't know, you have to be part of what educates them,
you have to be part of what talks with them and brings out from them the best in
themselves, in order for them to listen to your side of what you're trying to say.
And that for me is the best answer I can give, Chancellor, of how you live in this
polarized world. Stop screaming. Listen. Try to put yourself in the shoes of that
other person, try to figure out what it is they're feeling and the why of it. People,
when they feel threatened, tend to lash back and that sense of being threatened can
stop them sometimes from being nice, and so you have to work into getting them to be
a better part of themselves. I don't know if it will always work. It certainly doesn't work
to change my client -- my colleagues – minds, but we are civil to one another and there have
been moments, small victories, when some things have been won, and I think long term, it makes
a difference in letting our institution survive and I hope in the end our society to survive if
we can start remembering the good in each other. Thank you. For your Honor, our students, if we gave them the
possibility, would be asking you questions for probably the next 48 hours… All right… So, we're
not going to do that, but I am going to invite some students up to pose some questions. So, first
is Kimberly Cespedes Torres from the Brown School of Social Work, Class of 2022. Kimberly, where
are you? I'll be back up, okay? I'm gonna walk around and come up and take pictures with all of
you, okay, but ask your question, I am listening. How have you found your Latina upbringing and
life experience impact your decision-making as a Supreme Court justice? I'm asked that all the time
and I try to tell people, how do you disaggregate from anything a piece of who you are? If you look
at me and say Sonia is only a Latina, I'm insulted because I hope I'm something more than just
one little piece of who I am. I am the sum total of a lifetime of varied experiences and
all of those experiences have worked together to make me the person I am, to make me the
human being I am, to make me the justice I am. You know, you none of you could ever
sit back and say one thing defines me. It's a very limiting principle
to think of people in those ways, and so for me, I don't know that I can ever say
that the Latina part of me decided this case. There's no such thing, I am first
and foremost a woman but also Latina. I am catholic. I grew up with a catholic school
education but then I went to Ivy League schools. I was a prosecutor, I worked for corporations,
I have worked as a District Court judge, a Circuit Court judge, I've done countless
pro bono activities of different kinds, I have no idea whether one thing or another leads
me to a particular view or particular outcome in any one situation. What I do know is who I am as
a judge and that is committed to the rule of law, because I believe it's the way that we can more
effectively survive together as a community. You know, it seems simplistic, we go to
court to avoid battles in stadiums, right? You can resolve your disputes by duking it out in
a boxing ring or like the old people used to, like they used to do in old times, go into a stadium
and you know, fight a bull or whatever they did or fight each other. Crazy as that may sound,
that doesn't seem very effective to me. So, as a society we have laws and we interrelate with
one another, and those laws set the parameters of that relationship. And what we as judges do is to
provide you with a form of neutrality where you can come in, make your best argument, and we can
decide not on personal whim but according to law what the outcome should be in that case.
That's the best that I can do as a judge, is to give you that fairness, understanding that
even when I announce that I agree with one side because I think they're right, that the other
side feels aggrieved. They've lost something, they thought they were right, and
so, I am not God, I don't really know that moral right and wrong. I can't know it, because no matter
what I do I'm going to hurt somebody. And so, I try not to do that. I
try very hard to make my decisions on what I believe the law requires, so
that is not to naysay in any important way the importance of my of being a Latina to me. I
very often say, I am an incredibly proud American. I wear my pride in my nation on my
sleeve, but I have a Latina soul that was created by my family, by our culture,
by our music, by our food, by our dancing together. That's what your family does
for you, it creates the inside of you, it makes it alive, it brings it to
life, and that will never change for me. When President Obama called me to tell me
he would nominate me to the Supreme Court, he asked me to do one thing and that was to stay
connected to my community, and my response was, “That's a very easy promise to make Mr.
President. I don't know how to do anything else." What I didn't tell him is that I have a very big
umbrella as a community. It's not just Latinos, it's everyone in this world, including all of
you in this room who care about each other. So yes, Sonia Sotomayor is a Latina, but
she is that and I hope much more, too. So, before our next question, I’ll just
like to give everyone a friendly reminder that we're not taking photographs, and so
if you could keep your cell phones in your pockets I would be exceedingly grateful,
as I'm sure the justice would be as well. Our next question is from Raevyn Ferguson, Arts
& Sciences, Class of 2023. Hello, how are you? Hi Rae, hi, thank you. I'll get back up there. Thank you so much for being here with us
today and sharing your wisdom. My question is, how do you suggest we as minorities learn
to trust in the justice system as you do, knowing the ways in which the justice
system has failed us in the past. Ah, it's a big question, isn't it? You know, I've been studying recently Dred Scott, and this
city played a prominent role in the Dred Scott case. He was an African-American, a Black man
who had come to St. Louis, and under the laws of St. Louis then had been declared a free man. His
owners moved him to another state where he wasn't, where he continued to be a slave. When they moved
him back to St. Louis he sued for his freedom, and the law up until his lawsuit in Missouri
should have made him a free man permanently. It's a long interesting history, you're
in St. Louis, you should learn a little bit about it. Ultimately the case went to
the Supreme Court and in one of the most vilified decisions of the Court, the Dred
Scott decision, the Supreme Court decided that Black people, even in free states, were not citizens of the United States. That
decision, there were many other components, but that decision was one important factor in
the start of the Civil War of the United States. So, then you get Plessy versus Ferguson in, I think it's 1898, where the
court says separate but equal is okay. Famous dissent written by Justice Harlan, one
of the most important influential dissents, as was the dissent in Dred Scott by Justice
Curtis, by the way. Both extraordinary dissents, both of them basically talking about the
fundamental equality that underlay our union and our sense of citizenship. So, I wanted to
put that historical context in play for those who don't understand this question. The Court, until
Justice Ginsburg came to the Court into the 1990s, had no decision on behalf ruling in favor of
women's rights. The Court was always behind the Equal Rights Movement for women. We
permitted the exclusion of women from juries, we permitted in decisions by the Court
the exclusion of women from occupations like butchers, we permitted open discrimination
against women as well. So, how do you maintain faith in a system that does that? You do have
to take the long view. You have to realize that, terribly late, it took a civil war to undo Dred
Scott and give citizenship to Black people. It took more than 50 years for Brown
versus Board of Education to strike down separate but equal. It took Justice
Ginsburg getting to the Court and deciding the first case in favor of women,
the VMI, the Virginia Military Institute case, but it happened. We are a nation of men and women
and by definition we will be a flawed nation. We are building towards a more perfect union,
we're not there yet. We have to keep building it, we have to keep self-correcting. When we
go off path, we have to have the energy as citizens to insist on correcting our errors. But
that's how I keep optimism, by realizing that, yes, there have been inherent flaws in our system
of justice, but I'm here working as hard as I can, even when I just said to try to avoid
us going off in the wrong directions. And as I said from the very beginning
of my talk with you, that's your job. Many of the decisions we make, not the
constitutional ones, you can't change the constitutional ones, but you can certainly
change our interpretation of statutes, you can lobby for laws to be
changed that you don't like. You have the power to make change, you have to
believe in yourselves that you can do it. So, Rae, I don't give up on anything. I'm in it
for the long haul. I hope you are, too. Our next question is from Jarea Fang from
the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Class of 2022. All right, if that lovely
photographer's here and you come up, I can take the pictures with
these guys. Ah, Joe, hello. He's been following me around since Sunday night. Hello your Honor. How are you? I am
doing great. I'm happy to be here and I'm very happy that you're here, and my
question for you is… Tell me your name again. Oh, I'm Jarea. Jarea, thank you. And my question for
you today is, what is something that you want to say to all the young women of color who want
to serve on the highest court of the land? Ah, okay. Take off…you vaccinated? Everything okay?
Take off your mask and the two, yes three, okay, all right. Thank you. To
become anything in this world, and it doesn't mean just
being a Supreme Court Justice. Thank you. It means becoming anything you
want to become. You have to work hard. Thank you. Your next – come, I'll do it because I'm going to go
on that side next, okay? All right, thank you. There, yes, thank you, Sarah, thank you for your introduction. There's nothing that's handed to you in life,
whether you're a woman of color or anybody else. I tell young people when I meet, when I talk to
them, think of the greatest athletic star you can think of - Michael Jordan. If you think he was
born with a basketball in his hand, not likely. If you think he was born with that unerring
sense of getting the basket in that rim, didn't happen that way. He
practiced, he practiced, he practiced and practiced until he took the very best
in himself to reach the height of his game. And he became a superstar but he had a work
at it, and whether you're a person of color, sometimes people of color, they expect more of
us, we're not given a lot of slack at moments, the mistakes we make are sometimes
highlighted a lot more than others, okay? But it doesn't give us an
excuse not to put our heart into working as hard as we can to achieve what
we want. That means studying as hard as we can, when we can't figure out how to do something
asking for help, devoting the time, the energy and the passion to achieving what we want. Now,
if you were asking me the more specific question, I didn't aspire to be on the Supreme
Court because I didn't know what it was when I was growing up. I grew up in
a housing project in Bronx, New York, in a very poor, poor neighborhood. There were
no lawyers, there were no judges, our only contact with law enforcement was not a positive
one, it was somebody we knew getting arrested. With that kind of example, A) I had nowhere
to know what a Supreme Court justice was, but B) nothing positive to lead me towards
the goal of becoming a lawyer or a judge. Television and books did that for me,
ultimately, but not life example, okay? And even after I went to law school I realized,
they say becoming a Supreme Court justice is like being hit by lightning, those are the odds. Somebody said to me it was worse odds than
that even; I don't know how true that is but it's hard, and so I don't think you can ever live
or measure yourself or your success as a person by something so far away and unlikely that it may
never happen. And so, how I've lived my life is that every job I do, I concentrate on
that job and doing it as well as I can, because once you do that people will notice
and that will carry you to the next step. You can't lobby in that way to be a Supreme Court
justice but you can lobby to be the best lawyer, you can become the best District Court judge
when you serve as a District Court judge, a good Court of Appeals judge. And then luck
plays a role in everything that happens in life, because there's plenty of people out
there who have done what I've done and they're not justices, okay, so
there's always an element of luck. That I was lucky enough to be noticed
by President Obama. Having said that, the one thing I said to him, the last words
I said to him as I was leaving his office was, “Mr. President, this has been the greatest
honor of my life to be interviewed by you for a position on the Supreme Court. I
understand it's a difficult decision and you have some great candidates you're looking at.
Please understand that I love my life, I love everything I do as a Circuit
Court judge, I love my life in New York, if you don't select me, I won't come
away disappointed, I'll just be grateful that you considered me." And I meant every
word I said. I meant it because I felt it. And if you can live your life every day that
you work doing something that gives you that sense of satisfaction and that sense
of accomplishment, you've succeeded. And it's a wonderful measure of
success, is your own internal happiness in what you're doing, so I hope that
answered your question. And you are? This is Victor Kalil from McKelvey
Engineering, Class of 2022. Hello, Victor. Hello. It's an honor to be here with you
today. I was saying my question is, I believe one of the most important qualities anybody
can have, whether they're a friend or a leader, is empathy. You've talked about this
a lot today and so I was wondering, how do you incorporate empathy into your work,
especially when you know your rulings can have such a life-changing impact? Thank you,
Victor. Did I take a picture with you? Yeah. I did, okay. Sorry, I do concentrate on
what I'm saying so sometimes I lose the moment. If you read my decisions, and I say if you read
my decisions -- one of my greatest disappointments is by how few people actually ever read… Thank
you… a Supreme Court decision cover to cover. Do I have hands here? Even law students -- how
many of you have read a Supreme Court decision from beginning to end? Handful, not
all of you. Most people don't bother, you read the headlines, right? You read quotes
that the newspapers think are important, and that's all you read, and from that you make
a decision about whether the outcome is right or wrong, based on what you feel is right
or wrong. I say what you feel is right or wrong because you haven't read the decision
to see how the judges analyze the question, and you haven't taken the time to figure out
whether their analysis makes sense to you, whether it's convincing, whether the approach
makes sense or not, and that's the only way you can have an informed judgment about
what a Supreme Court decision is about. But, so I started with my statement because Victor
asked me this question. If you read my decisions, what you will see is that I very carefully try
to answer all of the points raised by the losing party, because I believe that out of respect
for someone who's brought their case to me, that if I'm going to say
they're wrong, I explain why. And I explain why the issue was important to
them, because recognizing what motivates people is a part of what empathy is about,
is explaining to them, I know how you feel and I know why you feel this. This is
why I believe the law can't give you a remedy, but it is not that I’M demeaning either your
views or the emotional impact of what's happening to you. That's really the only thing I can do
because as I explained, as a justice, as a judge, you're required to pick a side as right and the
other side by definition is going to feel that you're saying they're wrong. But I do
believe that most judges do spend time doing that in their opinions. There was a case
that I was involved in a number of years ago. It's called Phelps, and it involved an
organization, a religious organization, that believes that the military is corrupt and not religious
enough. and that it supports behavior that this religion opposes. They took
and have taken to protesting at the burial of war victims, of our soldiers in the military.
Now, as you can imagine, their behavior, because they put up really big signs
accusing the fallen soldiers sometimes of having sexual deviant conduct, and you can imagine
how parents feel, okay, and how charged the families are about this behavior. And the Court
was asked whether there was a way consistent with the First Amendment, to bar them completely from
protesting. And the Court ruled that there wasn't. Now, they couldn't disrupt the service and
they couldn't get into the face of the family, but that they had a right to be at a location near
the service and express their views. The Chief Justice wrote that opinion and it, the opinion,
went on rightly describing the heroes that fallen soldiers are and how offensive our ruling would
feel to many Americans, and so he acknowledged the emotions that people reading this decision
would have. But he then explains why we thought that that soldier had fallen for a greater value,
and that was the value of the First Amendment, he was serving in defense of our nation and its
Constitution. Some people won't be convinced, some people may still disagree with
that decision. One of my colleagues did, others didn't. The point remains, however, that
you will find in many Supreme Court decisions, especially ones involving divisive issues,
that we try to talk to both sides. Hello. Chancellor, are we near the end or?… Your Honor,
we have time for one, one brief question. Go ahead. Of course, you are an academic rock
star, both at Princeton and then at Yale, but you've continued your education throughout
your life. You've learned how to dance, you learned how to swim as an adult, you even
learned how to throw a baseball. Are there any new skills lately that might surprise folks that
are here this afternoon? Tell us a little about your commitment. All of those things I started to
learn after I was 40 years old. There were things I didn't grow up knowing how to do, couldn't
swim so i took swim classes and I’m passable, I'm not a great swimmer but I can at least
survive in the water. Now my mother said, because all of my cousins dance, especially all of
my female cousins, and I chided my mother one day for not teaching me how to dance and she looked
at me and said, “Sonia, I tried to teach you, you simply were too busy going around and
playing and never wanted to stop to learn it. She was right, I apologized. So, at 50 years old I
took private lessons and I’m passable in dancing. I have done many other things that I've learned to
do in the last few years. I took up playing poker. I read books about it, I've watched
the World Series of poker on TV, I've watched better players than me
play, and I've learned a little bit. It's a bit of, my playing is a bit of a
charity. I invite people to my home, I feed them, I give them all the liquor they
want. You buy any advantage you can in poker, and so when I win their money,
I don't have to report it. Your Honor, it has been a true privilege
and an absolute delight for you to speak, spend time with us today. This is one of
the days that will go down in the history of Washington University and
certainly one that no one in this audience will ever forget. So,
thank you so much for being with us. That's a great afternoon,
wonderful students. Thank you. And now Dr. G has a few closing remarks. That's
right. So, what a wonderful discussion. I do want to give a special thanks to Justice Sotomayor
for being here with us today, for sharing with us your name and your story to the entire WashU
community which is, gracias, thank you so much. I'd also like to thank our Chancellor
Martin for leading this discussion, and for our wonderful students,
both in the audience especially, and of the four students who got to ask
the questions. Thank you so much for that. I also want to give a special
thank you. There's many people who made this possible but I do want to thank Gina and your entire team, as well as, well as
Anh Le, from the justices’ office, and all of our marshals and all the individuals keeping her
safe. Thank you so much for all your great work. And finally, and we're going
to ask that you all remain seated until the justice has left the building. We do have special gifts for all of you who
are here, so as you exit you will receive that gift. So, please take your gift on your way out,
and really thank you all, but in the meantime, you have to stay seated until the justice
is out of the building. Thank you everyone.
