Sonia Sotomayor - A Day in the Life of a Supreme Court Justice | The Daily Show

it is truly an honor to have you here on the show and just so we're all on the same page ahead of time there are certain rules when speaking to a supreme court justice especially on tv and a few of those are um i i i know that you you cannot speak about any cases uh or any of your colleagues or anything that could negatively impact the institution that is the supreme court that is correct that is correct so i just have a few okay no these are ones all right um no welcome to the show let's begin with the book i haven't left you with much right no you have you have because i i want to talk about the book and then you know after the break it would be great to get into the court and everything you've experienced while serving on it um a children's book yes is not exactly where you would expect a supreme court justice to be you know you'd expect it to be a book about law or a book you know about what's happening in the country or life and legalese but a children's book is what you wrote just ask be different be brave be you why i write law every single day and most of it and most of it is going to go down in the history books and after much time passes some people may read one or two of those decisions but if i can affect the lives of children if i can inspire them to be bigger better braver than they believe they can be then i've left a real legacy in my judgment and so for me when i write for children or speak to them it's to create that lasting gift that i hope will inspire them to do something that they haven't even dreamed about oh wow i'm a supreme court justice and i tell kids all the time i grew up in a bronx housing project there were no lawyers or judges in the housing projects and i had no idea what the supreme court was i didn't start to learn about it probably till high school which is about when i started to read newspapers like the new york times right before that in my home we had the daily news the new york post and um the spanish newspaper which my father brought home every day uh from as he rode the train home but for me that's what i want kids to do to want to be more than they can imagine who inspired you to be more than you could imagine because here you are in a position highest courts in the land inspiring the youth but someone had to inspire you my mother born in greater poverty than i ever existed for me and my brother uh in a situation in which her mother died when she was nine and her father abandoned her and being raised by her older brother and older sister it was a tough tough life that she had and she did what millions of other young americans have done she joined the army wow during world war ii and she came over to the states and she ultimately met my father and my brother and i followed but my mom in her 40s went back not went back went to college and got her registered nursing lab that was amazing that is amazing wow so it's really hard with a mother like that not to think education is valuable i can only imagine and in the in the book it really speaks to it because you are talking to kids from a very personal place the book is called just ask and what i really what i really love about the book is you have these stories of a group of kids who go into a garden and really it's a tale about children who may be facing difficulties in their lives you know you you have a little child who has adhd you have another child who has tourette's you have sonya who has diabetes i i wonder where that came from and um and and it's it's a story about the kids having whatever they have to deal with but the one obstacle you don't want them to face is people judging them because of what they have to deal with judging them because of their difference right how did people judge you because of your differences like was there ever something that happened to you where with diabetes you know it seems like everyone just accepts that no but i they don't and the just-ass title was born over 30 years ago when i was seven and a half i was diagnosed with diabetes and i started to give myself injections of insulin every day and as was common back then gratefully less common today you were i was embarrassed by my condition right i thought it showed weakness i thought my friends would make fun of it and so i hid it and as i grew older and i took multiple shots a day because at first it was only one and i did that at home over time it grew to two shots and still at home morning and afternoon but as i grew older multiple shots a day were more common and more frequently before i ate anything i was in a restaurant in new york in my third early 30s and i would order my meal and then go to the bathroom to give myself my shot this day i didn't go into the stall i stayed in the public areas because it was a two-stall bathroom and there was no one there as i was finishing a woman walked in she saw me doing what i was doing and finishing up putting my injection away and i walked out i ate dinner finished walked by the woman and i overheard her say to her companion she's a drug addict and i stopped and the first emotion i felt was shame i was mortified and then i thought about it for a second and i turned around and marched back to the woman and said i'm not a drug addict i'm a diabetic and that shot you saw me take is the medicine that saves my life every day insulin and if you don't understand when someone's doing something different than you expect just ask don't presume the worst in and i walked away but that didn't make me decide to disclose my diabetes to others not yet what happened a few years later is i was at a party that i threw at my home with some of my best friends that i have in the whole world people who i know adore and love me and who take care of me in every situation and all of a sudden i fell asleep on my bed and they thought i was asleep i was really in a sugar low right i was semi unconscious thankfully someone had to shake me to ask me for the telephone for a cab to go home this is before uber ladies and gentlemen and lyft and all those other things at any rate um i struggled with trying to remember the number and i couldn't wow but i then just sat on a stair that was i had my backyard had a set of small steps and i sat down there couldn't go much further because that's what sugar glows do to you and one of my friends walked over with a piece of cake and i grabbed it with my hand and stuffed my face with it which was an unconscious reaction that i needed the sugar because you needed the sugar right well my friends didn't know what was happening because i had never told them and so i almost died in a room full of people who love me and i thought about it and had a conversation with many of them afterwards about what happened why and i realized that i should not hide my condition not only because it was dangerous for me but because if something had happened to me and my friends were there they would never be able to forgive themselves because they wouldn't have known something about you that could have saved your life exactly and i think it was a kindness to me and one to my friends where i then chose to become open about my condition and just ask is encouraging friends to look at the people in your life who do things differently or differently able right and talk to them about it figure out and find out how it affects them and how you can help and when because i don't need help all the time but i do sometimes and people should know that and you should know that about the people you love and care about and so for me the just ask is encouraging not just the children like me who are differently abled to speak about their conditions to be brave about them in the way they are every day right think about how hard it is for a dyslexic child to read now they can do it and they do it every day that they're in school but it's a challenge for them right and it's important to understand that challenge or julia who bears the name of a special little girl in my life who has tourette syndrome and it's actually one of my favorite scenes is that one if you look in the book you'll see one of the symptoms of tourette's is uncontrolled body movements right blinking is one of them but so are unexpected motion sometimes sounds and um julia's blinking and the owl blinks back at her but julia had an incident when she was smaller she was in a store and her tourette's went into action and she was moving around uncontrollably and a woman looked at her and said don't you have a mother that can control you wow thankfully she she does she has a mother who's a school teacher and set that lady straight [Laughter] oh i love it but every every single story in the book has that feeling of overcoming i also love that you you have the book in spanish as well just ask isolo pregunta if i said that correctly and the book is available now just us i i've always wondered what it is like to be on a supreme court and not just in terms of the legal part of it but all of the pressures that come with the job you know shaping the course of a country and at the same time trying to remove yourself from the fray of what's defining what is happening in that country how removed are supreme court justices from the everyday phrase like are you just like instagram only no twitter is that what you do i don't do either um some of my colleagues might i won't give them up okay i'm going to say ruth bader ginsburg i'm saying with bitter ginsburg twitter that's what i'm going with i think that would be far-fetched every one of the nine justices were incredibly devoted citizens and they were very active in our world before they became justices some of them were even in the political arena some of them have worked for the white house others everybody has as one of my dear judge friends once said to me most judges are political either in the capital p sense or the small p sense and the capital p is those who have worked in politics the small p are people like me who were involved in non-profit organization and other government organizations so everyone is an involved person and i dare say that every one of us is a little bit above the fray because we can't comment about the fray but we certainly read about what's happening in the world and we stay tuned to the news i'm not going to say which channels uh but everybody watches the daily show that's i mean that's what but no no no no don't no no no no no you can't applaud because then it would be true no sorry let's carry on please i forgive them justice i know we know but carry on but the point is that um we're not monastic in the sense of not knowing what's happening in the world so how do you then you know relate to each other because you one thing that has we don't talk about politics that's interesting that's actually what i wanted to know because you have you have nine people who have different political leanings who are all extremely skilled when it comes to applying law and oftentimes you have to argue against each other so when you're having lunch with each other when you're just you know in that downtime what what do you talk about no politics we stay away from religion and politics the two subjects that most people who if they don't want to fight should stay away from oh and we do so what do we talk about what bad movie did we see yesterday sometimes what good movie okay what books we're reading and most of my colleagues myself included love history books and so all of us are generally reading something that we find fun and will recommend to the others interesting we talk about kids lots of talks talk about grandchildren sometimes about food any topic that any group of friends would have that doesn't involve a contentious issue we talk about okay okay so you stay away from politics and then the final episode of game of thrones that makes sense the um the the court is constantly thrust into the spotlights especially in american news now you know apart from presidents that come and go apart from news stories that come and go what do you think is important in and around you know a confirmation of a justice or or what do you think the most important qualities of a judge have to be because it is you know one of the highest positions you can possess in the land uh i'm going to answer that differently i'm going to answer a question you haven't asked but i think is much more important what should you possess as a citizen and i think that in this room full of people if i ask every non-lawyer in the room and maybe some lawyers how many supreme court decisions have you read from beginning to end no one will raise their hand all the news people get is from the newspapers or television the sound bite right you know the headline yes this side one this side lost but nobody talks about the reasoning very few people do they'll quote a sentence here a sentence there but i think if you're going to be an informed person you should really read the decisions because that's where both sides if there are two sides court agrees a lot so it's not that every case is split right but those that are you should read both sides to understand which arguments were applied and why they were applied exactly and i think you will think more highly of the judges and i think you'll realize something that most people think don't think of you like a decision so you agree with the side that won if you don't you're going to disagree with them but unless you engage with the arguments you don't understand how hard the questions are and the fact that even when you win sometimes it wasn't so clear that you should have and so i think it would be make people much more respectful of the court as an institution but of course generally if they took the time to read those decisions that they feel affect them so deeply wow that's powerful but people won't read um so my counter would be my counter you count on that yes no i mean you know everyone would like the idea of everyone reading but my counter would be what you just said you said people get their news from the tv and the headlines and the sound lights the supreme court is still only in written and audio form and i'm saying like i could produce like a courtroom show where like you guys are on camera because i'm sure some people don't even recognize well you're not and you affect the country you could be signing autographs i'm not saying i could make you famous i'm just saying like you know i'm saying we could do like do you think maybe the court should jump into the era of like tv and broadcast what you're doing no you walk into our courtrooms and we're not made for tv the lawyers have presented us with briefs friends of the court calling me guy a lot more briefs the courts below have made a decision we start questioning lawyers most of the time the audience doesn't understand what we're talking about because we're asking from knowledge we're asking from the place where we have a question after everybody's finished explaining everything to us and so what we say can sometimes just be challenging for the sake of eliciting a response sometimes it can be genuine doubt about what the position of a person might be sometimes we're talking to each other and we're raising points through the questions that we want our colleagues to consider with us because we're thinking about it and we know we're going to bring it up at conference among ourselves so it's nice to get it out so that we can have some time to think on it so there's lots of reasons for what we're doing but none of them are ever perfectly understood often not among the people who are listening and i think if our arguments were televised it might change the dynamic you're going to get some people who will ask less questions we've already have one person who's made that choice right if you want more i think it could happen you would have more studied questions rather than those questions which are less studied and more inquisitive and that we do ask and seek answers to um and we're human beings and the drawer to play the tv affects every human being and so i think you would change our institutions so dramatically that it would be for it's worse not for the country's betterment every decision we make is written fully explained fully defended fully laid out but you can't do that and maintain a show now that you've said that i feel like no part of the us government should be on tv actually that's what some senators said to me that the partisanship in the senate started to grow when cameras went into the senate room because you want to appeal and you want to win votes and you want yeah the public that has no idea that those senate rooms now are completely empty it's the chair of the senate it is the senator speaking and some members of his staff there is no one else in the room but the camera and they're speaking to the camera not to each other and i know because i was interviewed by senators they're not back in their offices listening to what's happening on tv they're back in their office conducting business maybe a staffer is watching but many senators told me that they felt that much of the collegiality died when they stopped getting together in that room and were forced to listen to each other and were forced to sit next to each other and talk to each other now they barely see each other except running through the hallways so i think you said a joke some might think it might be a good idea to return to that because i understand how difficult it can be to be natural on tv justice sonia so my everybody [Music]

Channel: The Daily Show

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Keywords: the daily show, trevor noah, daily show with trevor noah, the daily show episodes, comedy central, comedians, comedian, funny video, comedy videos, funny clips, noah trevor, trevor noah latest episode, daily show latest episode, daily show, trevor, news, politics, daily show interview, Sonia Sotomayor, Sonia Sotomayor interview, Sonia Sotomayor children’s book, children’s book, Just Ask, Just Ask Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court, Supreme Court justice, diabetes

Id: HcMhgKywE1c

Length: 22min 51sec (1371 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 14 2021