Published in 2013
Judges on the bench are often
looked upon by the general public as belonging to a world of their own, in
which they are eternally ensconced behind a wall that cannot be penetrated by
anyone else, not even by lawyers who plead cases before them. We think of them as having attained a
position so high and holy and remote that it conceivably would be sacrilege for
a mere citizen to invade their domain of transcendent and learned authority. Has a judge ever invited you over for a cup
of tea or coffee just for the purpose of chit chat? In all likelihood the answer is negative. The fact that they are physically elevated
before the courts they serve goes a long way in creating this mind set. We literally look up to them, rarely
across.
This is especially true of
justices on Federal court benches, and that goes exponentially for the ones
appointed to the Supreme Court of our land.
Once the Senate has unearthed every pertinent fact about the candidate’s
past experience and has confirmed her or him for appointment and the candidate
has taken the oath, the one so invested tends to be sealed off in our minds’
eyes from that point on. Could it be
that these immaculate icons ever catch a cold or suffer anxiety or have to
interrupt their busy days with visits to the “necessary?” Maybe that robe is a talisman underneath
which God preserves their purity and immunity from all things mundane. This is why it is so refreshing and sobering when
one of them opens up and shares a personal history, as Sonia Sotomayor has done
in this rich and informative and inspiring autobiography. She is the first Hispanic appointed to that
highest court and the third woman. In
recent years in fact we have had not just one but two Supreme Court justices to
share their lives in writing, the other one being Clarence Thomas. (No, I have not yet read his book, but I plan
to.)
Let me make it clear from the
outset that “My Beautiful World” is not a political statement. Sotomayor makes it indelibly plain in several
places that she does not attach her name to any party or any activist
movement. Her narrative in fact begins
with her discovering at the age of seven that she had diabetes, a condition
that has plagued her all of her life.
She was required to learn how to give herself insulin injections,
neither parent feeling competent enough to do it for her – beginning at
seven. This disclosure in the very
beginning of the book sets the tone for all that is to follow. She opens up her life in fine detail, giving
vivid depiction of her world as a child in the South Bronx and as a member of
the Puerto Rican community. She
demonstrates ethnic pride in multiple ways while she speaks candidly of her
personal struggles and losses. She
divests herself completely of any mantle of high-mindedness or acquired purity
or professional inaccessibility. There
is nothing the least bit stuffy about her writing.
What the book’s narrative
makes incontrovertible is that this woman is a survivor. She had to survive not only the ever
threatening diabetes and the death of her alcoholic father when she was at the
tender age of nine but the protracted grief of her mother and grandmother over
that death that left her swimming emotionally and constitutionally on her own
for an extended time. She also had to
deal with her reputation in and out of the family for not possessing great
physical beauty - “a pudgy nose. . .gawky and ungraceful. . .bad taste in
clothes,” none of which she forthrightly denies. On the sparse occasions in high school when a
boy asked her out, she always felt like she was “everyone’s second
choice.” She had to survive in the relentless
struggle to summon confidence, always fighting a “tide of insecurity,” rooted
in the awareness that no one in her family or among her ancestors had ever
aspired to study law and make a career out of it.
Sotomayor also had to shed
the prejudices of her ethnic clan and the terribly harsh Catholic school
environment where corporal punishment was meted out for the most ridiculous
reasons and where learning was strictly by rote. When she reached her junior year in high
school a very enlightened teacher introduced her to essay writing, something
she had never heard of. She had to learn
that real education consisted of “understanding the world by engaging with its
big questions rather than just absorbing the factual particulars.” Her former instructors had only required her
to repeat back what she had been told.
She explains in great detail how this shift played a big part in her
later ministrations as an attorney and eventually as a judge. Someone practicing law must absorb a lot,
often having to become a temporary expert in some vocational field to make an
informed judgment. You have to see the
big picture.
She also had to penetrate the
language and cultural barrier, when she found herself at Princeton, a
culturally foreign environment. A
lesser spirit might have succumbed to the estrangement she felt from the old
guard Ivy Leaguers. She had to work
twice as hard to win respect and acceptance.
Not the least of the
complications and personal failures Sotomayor had to survive was the demise of
her marriage to her childhood sweetheart, Kevin. The two of them met in high school and formed
at once what they considered an indissoluble, life time bond. Both were great students, and they held to
the mistaken assumption that intellectual compatibility was enough to insure
all other kinds. Neither foresaw the
problem that her career demands would create for them when they tried to set up
a household and his career interests carried him in another direction. As friendly as the break-up was, she was left
for the first time in her life with little money as a childless single woman having
to make her material way on her own.
This turn of events added to the stress of pursuing her dream of being a
judge, one that had been conceived as a child when she feasted off the drama
and excitement of the Perry Mason series on television. She admired both attorneys in that show but
was fascinated even more by the figure each week on the bench. Now she was in the real game with all its
rough and tumble strains and stresses.
In short, her last crutch, her marriage, had been snatched away from her.
She went from Princeton where
she graduated in 1976 summa cum laude on to Yale Law School where she obtained
her law degree in 1979. From there she
went to work for the district attorney’s office in New York City as a
prosecutor and from there to a private law firm. From 1992 to 1998 she served as a judge for
the U.S. District Court in New York state and from1998 to 2009 on the United
States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where she remained until she
was sworn in to the Supreme Court in August, 2009, though she does not go into
detail about the nomination or crack the book on her present job. Her narrative actually ends about fifteen
years ago, about a decade before her present appointment. She does share gripping details and moments
of crucial decision making when she gets down to cases she handled as an
attorney, but even in this phase of her writing she keeps things personal and
links up all her experience to her ongoing process of self-discovery and
self-realization. Political posturing
never occurs.
I would like to close with
some quotes from the book that especially moved and inspired me.
In reference to her
father: “For all the misery he caused, I
knew with certainty that he loved us.
Those aren’t things you can measure or weigh. You can’t say: This much love is worth this
much misery. They’re not opposites that
cancel each other out; they’re both true at the same time.”
“I abhorred being pitied,
that degrading secondhand sadness I would always associate with my family’s reaction
to the news I had diabetes. To pity
someone else feels no better. When
someone’s dignity shatters in front of you, it leaves a hole that any feeling
heart naturally wants to fill, if only with its own sadness.”
“A chain of emotion can
persuade when one forged of logic won’t
hold. . .[and] a surplus of
effort [can] overcome a deficit of confidence.”
Describing what family has
meant to her: “What really binds people
as a family? The way they shore
themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come
through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent,
shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible
wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and
how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes
they herald.”
“My childhood ambition to
become a lawyer had nothing to do with middle class respectability and
comfort. I understood the lawyer’s job
as being to help people. . .The law for me was not a career but a
vocation.”
To read other entries in my
blog, please consult its website:
enspiritus.blogspot.com
I welcome feedback. Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net
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