Sonia Sotomayor
Sonia Sotomayor
Sonia Maria Sotomayoris an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, serving since August 2009. She has the distinction of being its first justice of Hispanic heritage, the first Latina, its third female justice, and its twelfth Roman Catholic justice. Sotomayor, along with John Roberts and Elena Kagan, is one of the youngest justices on the Supreme Court...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSupreme Court Justice
Date of Birth25 June 1954
CityBronx, NY
CountryUnited States of America
It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.
I stand on the shoulders of countless people, yet there is one extraordinary person who is my life aspiration. That person is my mother, Celina Sotomayor.
If I write a book where all I've ever experienced is success, people won't take a positive lesson from it. In being candid, I have to own up to my own failures, both in my marriage and in my work environment.
The task of a judge is not to make the law - it is to apply the law.
I've never had my dexterity called into question, but I think if that was ever the case, I could acquit myself by tossing a ball back and forth horizontally between my hands.
how many times would a defendant's lawyer enter the courtroom before a session and ask each of the male clerks and paralegals around me, 'Are you the assistant in charge?' while I sat there invisible to him at the head of the table?
I accept the proposition that... to judge is an exercise of power and because ... there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives -- no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging, I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions.
I am a very spiritual person. Maybe not traditionally religious in terms of Sunday Mass every week, that sort of thing.
I've spent my whole life learning how to do things that were hard for me.
[On the desert:] The wind was a constant, and when you paid attention, it seemed like the earth's own breathing.
The best I could say about third grade was that it was a more or less continuous state of dread.
as for the possibility of 'having it all,' career and family with no sacrifice to either, that is a myth we would do well to abandon, together with the pernicious notion that a woman who chooses one of the other is somehow deficient.
There are no bystanders in this life.
That tide of insecurity would come in and out over the years, sometimes stranding me for a while but occasionally lifting me just beyond what I thought I could acomplish. Either way, it would wash over the same bedrock certainty: ultimately, I know myself.