Recent Entries

Her drive and discipline carry her first to newly co-ed Princeton, and then to Yale Law School, in New Haven, Conn., a city she found "depressed and threatening, no better than the South Bronx and a lot less lively." Sotomayor's most engaging writing comes in these chapters on higher education, when she reckons with the consequences of affirmative action and the social gaps that separated her from richer classmates. "I had been admitted to the Ivy League through a special door," the justice acknowledges. As a freshman at Princeton her writing skills are shaky ("my English was riddled with Spanish constructions and usage"). When a classmate mentions Alice in Wonderland, she responds, "Alice who?" While working a data-entry job as part of her scholarship, she finds herself inputting financial records for Princeton's legacy students. For a girl whose family didn't even have a bank account, "this was my first glimpse of trust funds; tax write-offs and loopholes; summer jobs at Daddy's firm that paid the equivalent of a year's tuition."

But unlike her benchmate and fellow Yale alum Clarence Thomas — who in his own memoir called himself "humiliated" by "the taint of racial preference" — Sotomayor insists that affirmative action rightly served "to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run." Affirmative action policies did not supplant hard work; they created the conditions for her hard work to be rewarded. And as she points out, a summa cum laude degree from Princeton, a spot on the Yale Law Journal and a job with Robert Morgenthau at the New York district attorney's office are not "given out like so many pats on the back to encourage mediocre students."

The Sotomayor Interview