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EDUARDO PENALVER: Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Eduardo Peñalver. I'm the Allan R Tessler Dean of Cornell Law School. Before I begin, I'd like to thank President Martha Pollack for co-sponsoring this very special event. I'd also like to thank all the staff at the law school, across the university, and at the Supreme Court for their hard work meticulously planning today's fireside chat.
It's now my great privilege to introduce today's distinguished speakers. Judge Richard Wesley is a graduate of Cornell Law School, a member of our class of 1974. In 1986, after many years in private practice and a brief stint at the New York State Assembly, Judge Wesley was elected to a 14-year term as a New York State court trial judge. In 1997, Governor George Pataki appointed him to the New York Court of Appeals, our state's highest court. In 2003, President George W Bush appointed Judge Wesley to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Judge Wesley is known for his collegiality and fairness as well as his good humor and common sense. And we like to think he gained at least some of those traits at Cornell Law School. A native of Livonia, New York, where he still resides, Judge Wesley is famous for his Livonia Post Office test in which he asks whether he could explain a decision he's making in any given case to his neighbors in line at the post office. Please join me in welcoming the Honorable Richard Wesley.
[APPLAUSE]
Joining Judge Wesley in conversation this afternoon is our guest of honor, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justice-- go ahead.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]
Yeah. Justice Sotomayor was appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President Barack Obama in 2009.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]
This might take a while. In assuming that role, she became the first person of Hispanic heritage to serve on our nation's highest court and just the third woman.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]
And just the third woman to do so, joining Cornell's own Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]
Before joining the Supreme Court, she was a judge on the Second Circuit, to which she was appointed by President Bill Clinton. For six of her years on the Second Circuit, she served with Judge Wesley. The two of them, a Bush appointee from Livonia and a Clinton appointee from The Bronx, became fast friends. And I think there's a lesson for all of us in that. Before her elevation to the Second Circuit, Justice Sotomayor was a federal trial court judge. In fact, she's the only justice currently sitting on the Supreme Court to have served as a trial judge.
She also worked as an assistant district attorney for New York County and as a lawyer in private practice. A native of The Bronx and a self-described New Yorican, Justice Sotomayor grew up in the Bronxdale houses, a public housing project, before attending Princeton University. She graduated there summa cum laude and then attended Yale Law School.
Some of you will recall that during her Supreme Court confirmation process, Justice Sotomayor attracted criticism from some corners for comments she had made to various student groups, including the Latina Law Student Association here at Cornell in 2008, in which she asserted that as a Latina she brings an important perspective to the federal judiciary. The ensuing pseudo-controversy made the phrase wise Latina something of a battle cry.
To my mind, the distinctive voice that Justice Sotomayor has brought to her work at the Supreme Court has more than vindicated her claim. To give just one example, consider her dissenting opinion in the 2016 case of Utah vs Strieff. In Strieff, a police officer had illegally stopped a man and asked for his identification. Using that ID, the officer discovered an outstanding arrest warrant for a minor violation.
He then arrested the man on the warrant and searched him, discovering a small amount of methamphetamine. The Supreme Court's majority said that the drug evidence was admissible in court, even though the initial stop and request for ID had been illegal, because discovery of the warrant removed the taint of the earlier illegal stop.
Justice Sotomayor thought that the majority's decision would encourage police to make more unjustified stops. And so she wrote a dissenting opinion that has quickly become required reading in many criminal procedure courses, one that drew on the full breadth of her personal and professional background, not just as the court's only Latina, but as its only former trial court judge and as the only justice who's worked extensively with local law enforcement.
She took the majority to task for describing the initial stop and request for identification as a negligibly burdensome precaution. It's no secret, Justice Sotomayor observed, that people of color are disproportionately the victims of this type of scrutiny. As a result of the police officer's focus on people of color and the arbitrary nature of many of these stops, she argued, they label people of color as second-class citizens. When the police stop you because they're looking for evidence of a more serious crime, Justice Sotomayor explained, the stop can quickly become degrading and intimidating, not to mention dangerous.
Citing the work of Cornell Law Professor Gerald Torres, Justice Sotomayor contended that the harm to black and Latino young men subjected to these kinds of illegal stops should concern us all. These young men, she said, are the canaries in the coal mine, whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere.
Justice Sotomayor's powerful and prophetic dissent in Strieff underscores the value of her presence on the Supreme Court. She brings to our nation's highest court a distinctive perspective, and dare I say a wisdom, that it would otherwise lack. She brings to it the distinctive wisdom of a former district attorney, the distinctive wisdom of a former trial court judge, and yes, the distinctive wisdom of a Latina from The Bronx. It's our great privilege to have her here with us today. Please join me in welcoming the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]
RICHARD WESLEY: I think we're supposed to wait for a minute for photographs, but I don't see a photographers. Oh, no.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: They'll manage it.
RICHARD WESLEY: Well, I think we need to straighten the record out.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Wow, this is pretty impressive.
RICHARD WESLEY: Well, I promised you a full house. I think we should set the record straight. Justice Sotomayor was nominated to the Southern District Court in New York by George Herbert Walker Bush, Bush 43. So we are both Bush nominees, I at the circuit and she at the district court. So we do share a father-son relationship. I think I better move on.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I think so.
RICHARD WESLEY: First of all, Justice Sotomayor, on behalf of all of us at--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: How about Sonia.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK. All right. Well, I wanted to be-- you know, you--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Yeah, I know.
RICHARD WESLEY: You still can reverse me, so I'm-- and I'm a little concerned about a couple. I'll talk to you later. So let's--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: No, he won't.
RICHARD WESLEY: Let's talk a little bit, and we've given you some questions that we'd like to ask you. And then if we get a chance, maybe we'll move around the audience. If we get a chance to do that.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: We're going to get a chance to do that.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Somebody cut me off when I'm talking too long. OK?
RICHARD WESLEY: And should we mention your books now or should we get started now or work--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Why don't we mention them now and get them out of the way. How's that?
RICHARD WESLEY: All right. Sonia's first book is Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World. You'll see that it's tabbed by RCW, who's read it twice. It's a compelling book. I think on the second read, you discover an even greater texture and depth to the life of Sonia Sotomayor. And I was glad to have had a chance to read it a second time. Growing up in the Bronx and being the first in your family to go to college and to experience the things you did. And then we took your life-- you took your life story and put it into children's books.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: A picture book. And I have to say, I have collected more than 2,000 hugs from kids in the last month. I've been on book tour, and this book is an illustrated children's book, ages four to eight. But I would buy it anyway so that when you read that book with a middle school book for four to eight, you would look at the pictures.
I believe in the power of words. I think words are wonderful shields and incredible swords. And they paint pictures and should paint pictures in your mind. So when you read, , you are reading to be able to stimulate your imagination. And when you can do that, you can actually become more creative as a human being and more interesting also. But there is something to be said, I've learned after I finished this illustration, about seeing what the author's vision is, because the pictures in here are part of what my vision is.
RICHARD WESLEY: Do you have a set of favorite pictures in that book?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Oh, I do. I do.
RICHARD WESLEY: This is not rehearsed, by the way.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: No. First of all, I'd like you to look at the cover and notice a few things. There's a little frog on a leaf from two plants in Puerto Rico. And the illustrator, Lulu Delacre, is of Argentinean parents who was born in Puerto Rico. And she drew rough sketches for me to look at before she began to finalize each picture. And I got her sketches, and I sent her a message back that says, Lulu, where's my [SPANISH]?
[WHISTLE]
Thank you. Do it again.
[WHISTLE]
At night, when the sun goes down in Puerto Rico, that song goes for miles around. It's that tiny little frog, and it lulls everybody to sleep. So I wanted the cover for people to understand from the beginning that this was my two worlds, not just the mainland and the Supreme Court, but the part of me that's still a part of Puerto Rico. And the frog is a symbol of that.
And in here is a decision I wrote. And in fact, it's the centerpiece of the moot court this afternoon.
RICHARD WESLEY: Ah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: All right? JBD vs. North Carolina. It's a case about questioning a teenager by police in school. And so she found that case and put the words there. I actually got the cover when she put the words in, and I started reading the words, and I said this is my case. And finally, I'm holding a little key. That little key is the key to my success, I tell kids. It will tell you how I reached where I have, and it was through education and reading.
And so this book is about how reading influenced my life, how libraries and schools and books and comics and newspapers and magazines and the Constitution and the Bible and so many other things influenced my life. So that's one of my favorite, and there are others in here. I commend anybody who gets the book to read the story of my being diagnosed with diabetes. That's me running away from the lab technician, because the needle looked too big.
I ran-- the lab, it was a small hospital my mother worked in. The lab was on the opposite end of the front door, and when the needle came close to my arm, I ran straight out of the hospital, under a car. It took six people to drag me out, hold me down on the table. And I tell kids I was screaming so loud that I didn't feel the needle going in.
RICHARD WESLEY: Now, you were very private about your diabetes until into your adulthood, weren't you?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Very much so. I was actually in my 30s. And an incident happened in my own home where I had a diabetic sugar low.
RICHARD WESLEY: Right.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And in the middle of a party I was hosting, I seemingly fell asleep. And every best friend I had in the world was at this party, and not one of them knew what was happening.
RICHARD WESLEY: But your-- Theresa, who later became your judicial assistant when I first met you--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: She was my--
RICHARD WESLEY: Theresa [INAUDIBLE].
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: She was working with me.
RICHARD WESLEY: She was working with you at the time. And she's the one that got you some sugar or got--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Oh, no, no, no, no. I finally woke up.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And I sat down, went to my backyard and sat down on a step. And Theresa was sitting next to me. She had a piece of cake.
RICHARD WESLEY: Oh, that's it. Right.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And I took my hand and I went for her cake. And I stuffed it in my mouth. At that point, she knew something was wrong. She said, I know a whole lot about you, and you doing something like that is very unusual. But that's when I became open about my disease.
RICHARD WESLEY: And certainly when you were--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I should call it that-- my condition.
RICHARD WESLEY: Your condition. A condition that you shared with my father. My father was a brittle diabetic, and I remember every morning my father having a shot, and I just-- I warned you I'd tell this story. Early on in my years at the court, for some reason Sonia and I sat disproportionately with each other, and because Sonia's senior to me, she would be to my right, and she'd be presiding. And Sonia's known for her vigorous questioning. Some would call it tough.
And she's questioning this lawyer, and there's a ledge, and she starts to-- a little glass case, and she starts to fool with the glass case, and she opens up the glass case. And then she pricks her finger, and she puts some blood on a little piece of tape. And she's looking at it. She puts it in a glucose meter or something, and she looks at that and then she immediately opens up another little glass case, and there's a syringe.
And she grabs the syringe, and she leans forward, and she pulls her robe up and her skirt up, and she jams the syringe in the side of her leg and goes like that. Now, I know what she's doing, you know, because my dad's a diabetic. But what you don't know is that because of my father's diabetes and his morning shots, I get really queasy when people get shots. And all of a sudden, I'm in a cold sweat. And I'm thinking I'm going to look like an idiot if I pass out. But you've always been very-- and I think a lot--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: By the way, that shut him up for the rest of the session. I got to ask more questions.
RICHARD WESLEY: You did that just to make me be quiet.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I did. It worked.
RICHARD WESLEY: I wouldn't put that past you at all. No, I do. But I think that-- the point, I think, is that you've been so open with it because it makes people realize that any kind of health condition is not a limitation. It's just something that you deal with. You've dealt with it very well over the years.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Health conditions live with you. They are a part of your life. If you have a condition like mine that's forever, then every waking moment of my life, it's a part of who I am. And it doesn't define me, but it certainly does give me powers, strengths, that other people don't have. I have a discipline that most people don't possess.
And I'm sure, very sure, that it had to do with my diabetes. I have to be monitoring my body every moment to see how I feel. Are my sugars too low? Are the sugars too high? What am I going to do when there's a piece of food in me? How much insulin do I give myself?
All of those things teach me to do something most people forget, which is how to take care of themselves. So I bet that if I asked the students in this room to tell me how many of them get yearly physicals, more than half wouldn't raise their hand. I always have. And I also know when something's wrong, and I don't fool around about going to the doctor.
RICHARD WESLEY: You know, pay real attention.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Exactly. But that teaches you something, how to be careful about yourself and how to care for yourself, that all of us should naturally possess but don't.
RICHARD WESLEY: So let's switch gears just a little bit, a little bit of a turn. And that theme of difficulties in life and using those difficulties as a pivot point to make yourself stronger is really a theme that runs through your whole life, I think. Having looked through that, read the book now a couple of times, when you were a little girl, only Spanish was spoken in your house. And you realized quickly that you had to learn English, and you taught yourself English pretty much on your own.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: This was before bilingual education was a thing. It was many years later that a lawsuit was brought by an organization that I ultimately joined, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, now Latino Justice, but the fund brought an action against the New York City Board of Education, because there were Latino children coming to school, and they weren't being transitioned into English. So for a lot of these kids, myself included, some of these earlier years of their life were lost years. Can you imagine sitting in a classroom and having the teacher teach you when you don't understand a word of what she's saying?
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And if you look at my grades my first four years in school, I was of marginal student. It was actually the death of my father in fourth grade that, because of the unhappiness in my home, I was looking for an escape, and I found the library, the public library in my neighborhood. And I would go there and get lost in books. And getting lost in books began to teach me English and how to understand things. And in fifth grade, I started to jump to the top of my class.
RICHARD WESLEY: And you did-- from that point on--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: It did, but it took that long.
RICHARD WESLEY: --your academic career was stunning.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: But I'm a firm believer that adversity and failure are things you want to have in learning how to manage those challenges in your life, in learning how to live with difficulties, in learning what failures can teach you about what you need to do better, what you need to learn more.
Those things help you grow. And inevitably, they help you grow in positive ways. It's only when you let them define you-- when you let them define you-- that they become negatives. And that's something I would never permit those things to do. Sonia is Sonia not because of them but with them.
RICHARD WESLEY: And there were people along the way.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Oh, gosh.
RICHARD WESLEY: There were people along the way, and the book is filled with a list of those folks that saw something in you and believed in you. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you reacted to it and how it made you feel?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Well--
RICHARD WESLEY: If you want. I mean--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Maybe I'll come to that in a slightly different way.
RICHARD WESLEY: Fair enough.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: All right? Which is why did I write those books?
RICHARD WESLEY: OK.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I wrote those books because once I was nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court, it was like going from one world to the universe.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK, yeah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Think about it. I had a fairly important position, Second Circuit Judge.
RICHARD WESLEY: Oh, you're a damn good Second Circuit judge.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: You know what? I really loved it.
RICHARD WESLEY: You agreed with me almost all the time.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And people-- some people-- some lawyers in New York and Connecticut and in Vermont knew me well.
RICHARD WESLEY: Indeed.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And there were some people who were lawyers across the country who knew who I was, but I wasn't a world figure.
RICHARD WESLEY: No.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: You get on the Supreme Court, the platform is the world. And that platform becomes all consuming. Being a justice just changes your life in such a fundamental way. And I was overwhelmed by those changes my first year. I have subsequently found out from all of my colleagues that every new justice feels the same way. You spend a lot of time wondering why am I here? What's my role? How did this happen to me and why?
And for me, I realized something that I feared, which is I liked Sonia. I loved my life. I loved New York. I loved everything that I had grown up with. And I was afraid in this new world I would lose it. You know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And how many people who move into these public positions sort of withdraw, and I didn't want to do that. And I started to realize that I had to hold onto who I was. And for me, the process to do that was writing that book. And it let me remember all of the people who made me who I am.
RICHARD WESLEY: Let you focus on--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: On retaining that.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And I tell my friends all the time, if I ever get conceited, pick up that heavy book and hit me over the head with it. And I have friends who will, including-- present company included.
RICHARD WESLEY: No way. Those Marshals are big guys. See that big guy down there on the floor. That big guy. I'm not dealing with that big guy right there with the ear piece on. You know the ear piece thing.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: But you would tell me.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: You would tell me.
RICHARD WESLEY: But this was not something new for you. When you went to Princeton, you say in the book that at Princeton, at first you felt really out of it at first.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I was.
RICHARD WESLEY: And you looked at all these white folks, prep school people, and you're saying to yourself, I'm from The Bronx. This is not-- this is uncomfortable.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: You remember the story outside the gym, right?
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: First two or three days at Princeton, we have to go to the main gym-- not the main gym, the secondary gym-- to go speak to advisors. So I'm sitting outside waiting for some friends to go in. And there's this woman next to me. She has the most beautiful Southern accent, although I had never really heard a Southern accent. And I was having a hard time listening to her.
But she's going on and on and telling me how proud she was to be at Princeton. Her grandfather had gone to Princeton. Her father and uncles had gone to Princeton, her brothers, and now she was the first woman in the family to go to Princeton. And she's talking about what that meant to her.
And I'm sort of listening to her, and I'm thinking I'm the first generation of my family going to college, forget about going to a place like Princeton. And coming towards me are two of the friends I had made, my Mexican-American roommate, Dolores, and another woman from Puerto Rico, Theresa, and they're talking Spanish. And this woman next to me looks at me and says, this is what I love about this place. There are so many different and strange people here. And I sat there, and I thought, and here I thought you were the strange one.
RICHARD WESLEY: [LAUGHTER]
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: But that was my experience at Princeton. People talking about doing things that I never imagined-- taking vacations, some spring breaks in Europe, having gone to private schools, the foods they ate. The things that they did were things that I never imagined as possibilities in my life. It's so interesting. I never imagined them and yet now I've done them all.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah. And indeed--
[APPLAUSE]
And indeed, as a senior, there is a prize given to one individual or two to deliver a talk at graduation based upon both academic merit and participation in the college community, and you gave that speech.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I did. It was quite an honor. And I actually didn't know what it was. I got a call from the Dean of Students. She said you won the Pyne Prize. I said, oh, that's wonderful. That's really terrific. What do I have to do? I have no idea what she's talking about. So I called a dear friend, whose two parents were college professors, right after I hung up with the Dean of Students, and I said, Felice, what's the Pyne Prize? And she explained it to me. It was very strange.
RICHARD WESLEY: When was it that you first began to have a sense that the law was an area where your life was going to go?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: That was very early on. See, when I was diagnosed with diabetes at age 7 and 1/2, one of the things I learned shortly thereafter was that there were certain occupations I couldn't do, including law enforcement. When I was told that-- that's not true today for anyone who has the condition, but that's what it was like back then.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: At any rate, I was told I couldn't do that, and my dreams were dashed. You see, I had begun later to start reading Nancy Drew. And reading the book, I realized I can't be a detective like her. I have diabetes. Now, shortly thereafter, I started watching Perry Mason.
RICHARD WESLEY: Perry Mason.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: First TV lawyer. Watch it on YouTube, guys.
RICHARD WESLEY: Raymond Burr.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Raymond Burr.
RICHARD WESLEY: God bless him.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: At any rate, first TV lawyer. And the first half of his show, he spent investigating the crime his client was charged with.
RICHARD WESLEY: Right.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And the second half, he spent proving his client was innocent.
RICHARD WESLEY: And he always won.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Yes.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: By the way, I've been a judge for 25 years and a lawyer for 12 before that. Have you ever heard of any such thing?
RICHARD WESLEY: No.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: No. He'd get the guilty party to confess in the courtroom. OK? That just doesn't happen. You can prove somebody not guilty, but getting confessions in the courtroom is a hard thing to do. At any rate, I realized that being a lawyer, you could be a detective.
So I switched fantasies. Now I'm going to be a lawyer, and there was a Perry Mason episode at the end of which I noticed what happened and paid attention to it. Perry Mason gets somebody to confess, he turns to the judge who's sitting up on this high bench and says, Your Honor, please dismiss the charges against my client and release him from bail. And the judge turns around and says so ordered, and the guys let go. And I realized at that moment Perry Mason's done all the hard work. But the one who has the final say is the judge.
RICHARD WESLEY: Ah. Ah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I want to be the judge. So that fantasy, that thinking followed me to college. And in fact, at some point in college, I decided maybe I should really think about this more seriously.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And what is it about lawyering that appeals to me? And I began to realize what it was was that laws define our relationships as a community, not just defines them but creates them. How we generally interact with each other, how we share limited resources as a society with each other, that's all structured in laws.
It's from something as simple as to go to the corner and stop at a red light-- a law tells you to do that, right-- to more complex things like why do you send your children to school? Because we as a society have decided it's something good for us. You pay the price if you're a kid. You go to school. And it's a price we like.
But there are some prices we don't like. There are laws that people feel or begin to believe are unfair. They may be executed in a way we think is unfairly or their impact is different from what lawmakers originally thought.
And those differences, those disagreements, are what should be motivating us as community members to be engaged in changing laws that we don't like. That's how we stay fresh as a community. That's how we grow as a society. And so for me, I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to be a voice in those positive changes.
And I'm here today and I speak publicly, because I'm trying to engage every student in this room to remember that your most important job in life as a member of this community is to be involved in bettering it, to be a voice for change, to take action when you see things you don't like, to be civically involved in making this a better union. It won't happen by anything the Supreme Court does alone. It won't happen by any Congress or any president acting alone. It happens when we work together to make the perfect union. And so that's what law did for me.
RICHARD WESLEY: And so Princeton goes really well. And off to Yale. I mean, a real--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: You know, we've got to start working around or these kids won't see me, and then we're going to come to the kids' questions.
RICHARD WESLEY: All right. We're going to get up and move. Here we go.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: OK.
RICHARD WESLEY: This is called the road show portion.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Yes. All right. You've got to stay seated, because the security people don't like me doing this.
RICHARD WESLEY: This guy's really big too.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Yeah.
RICHARD WESLEY: He's really big.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: They get nervous when I walk around, and if you jump up, they get really nervous.
RICHARD WESLEY: And he's mastered the Alaskan choke-hold.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: He's just being very bad, you know that?
RICHARD WESLEY: So, do want-- what we have is, we have some questions that have been submitted from students. And I'm going to read one of them, and if the student is present, we'd like you to raise your hand and Sonia is going to answer the question.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Hello.
RICHARD WESLEY: And see, she's really running for president, if you want to know the truth.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I am not. Oh, no, no, no. I am not.
RICHARD WESLEY: She's not.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I'm not.
RICHARD WESLEY: No, no, no. I just realized--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I love my job.
RICHARD WESLEY: Now, let me-- I just realized she is definitely not. That was a completely unauthorized [INAUDIBLE]. John Roberts will have my head.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Yes. No, I will.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK. Here we go.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: All right. You've got to keep moving, though.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK. I'm moving. I'm moving. I'm moving.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Hello.
RICHARD WESLEY: All right.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Hi. How are you?
RICHARD WESLEY: OK, Sonia.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: OK. Thank you for being here.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you for coming.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Thank you.
RICHARD WESLEY: Sonia, first a really tough question.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Hold on. Let me not make or break the law this early.
RICHARD WESLEY: Do you see how compliant she is, everybody? Dylan Penze, are you here? Dylan Penze, come on down.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Where are you?
RICHARD WESLEY: Sonia.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Ask the question.
RICHARD WESLEY: Sonia.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Yes.
RICHARD WESLEY: I'm going to ask the question while you're shaking hands.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: You can do-- I can multitask.
RICHARD WESLEY: Who has the best pizza in New York City?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Oh, that's a wonderful question.
RICHARD WESLEY: Come on, Dylan.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: If you want traditional Bronx, New York pizza, you go to Joe's Pizza on Bleecker Street.
RICHARD WESLEY: Joe's on Bleecker. Come on, Dylan, get over here. If you want your picture taken, get over here.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: It's where I live close to New York, and it's terrific.
RICHARD WESLEY: He's confused wandering around Bailey Hall. He's got to take the bar exam.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: It's a pleasure. Where's the camera here? Ah.
DYLAN: Thank you. Thank you so much.
RICHARD WESLEY: There you go, Dylan. There you go.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: All right.
RICHARD WESLEY: What advice-- this is a tough one.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Go ahead.
RICHARD WESLEY: This is a tough one.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: What advice?
RICHARD WESLEY: And this comes from Lindsay Schaff. Lindsay?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Hello.
RICHARD WESLEY: Are you here? I may have mispronounced it. Hang on, Lindsay. Lindsay Roth. Lindsay, where are you? Come on, Lindsay.
[APPLAUSE]
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Thank you. All right. What's that question?
RICHARD WESLEY: All right, you ready?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I am.
RICHARD WESLEY: What advice can you give for young women Attorneys and law students in this time of national reckoning when many feel like their voices are not being listened to?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Well-- how are you? We went to law school together. Gerard, how are you doing? Are you up here?
SPEAKER 2: I'm up here.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I'm asleep. I had forgotten. I already spoke about it. You don't get heard unless you keep asking.
LINDSAY: Hi.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Ah, there you are. Look, you don't get success merely by asking. You have to work at success. Anything you do in life requires hard work. And anything that's worth getting requires even harder work. And you can't take disappointment and despair and let it control you. We have only one option in this world, and that's to keep on trying. People have died for our freedoms.
How many civil rights leaders gave their lives so that we could have the voices we have today? If they can give their lives, we can expend our energy in making their dream come more true. So for me, if you're a young lawyer and you start despairing about what's happening, all you look at it and say is, how do I go about changing it? That's the only choice we have. And so don't ever give up. All right? You keep asking, people will listen.
LINDSAY: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
RICHARD WESLEY: Did you get your picture?
LINDSAY: Yeah.
RICHARD WESLEY: All right. All right. Christopher Capeci, where are you? Come on, Christopher. Come on over.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Now, watch. I'm going to get over there, and the person with the question are going to be over here. That's that way it happens.
RICHARD WESLEY: Are you listening?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I'm listening. I always listen.
RICHARD WESLEY: You are the only justice to have served as a trial-level judge. How has your experience impacted your work on the Supreme Court?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: You know, if you read my decisions, what you will see is that there isn't a case where I don't talk-- oh, my gosh.
RICHARD WESLEY: That's you with our granddaughter three weeks ago.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: This is one of the hugs I collected. Now, you tell her you met me too, OK?
SPEAKER 3: We will.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Now I forgot the question. I never do that. I got distracted by the thing there.
RICHARD WESLEY: Has you work on the district court affected your views on the Supreme Court?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I am the only Justice who in every single opinion I write, I talk about the consequences of our ruling. And I really do think that that's a product of having been on the trial court, because there you have parties who directly appear before you. You see them as human beings. You see them, whether they're people suing each other or they're corporations against corporations, you see the entities. You see them as living, breathing people and institutions.
And because of that, I think I was taught to understand that you always have to be cognizant of what your ruling's impact will be. And so it doesn't always mean that you rule in favor of the person who you think is most badly hurt by the law. That's not the way we operate.
Laws have certain consequences, and sometimes they affect people negatively. But if you're going to do that, at least know it. Own it. And understand and try to explain why you still think that this is the right outcome under the law or this is the outcome that the law requires.
And in some instances, you say I don't like it, and you call upon Congress or others to change it. And sometimes you just express it as wrong. But it's what the law requires. So for me, I think that's the greatest impact of my having been a district court judge.
CHRISTOPHER: Thank you.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Thank you.
RICHARD WESLEY: All right. Sonia.
[APPLAUSE]
CHRISTOPHER: Thank you very much.
RICHARD WESLEY: You know, sometimes I feel like the little dog out for a walk.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Well, go ahead.
RICHARD WESLEY: Sonia, I've got one more question. One more question. Then we've got to go back to the stage or we're going to get in trouble.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Oh, I don't want to do that. I have to go over there. So I have to go run. Hold on.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: So you better slow down.
RICHARD WESLEY: Connor Grant Knight. Where are you, Connor? Where are you? Is that the young man standing up or is he going to the bathroom? Are you Connor Grant Knight? Come on, Connor. Oh, my God. She ran out the door. Come on, Connor. We're going. Hurry up.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: No, I'm not going out.
RICHARD WESLEY: That's right.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Oh, OK.
RICHARD WESLEY: Which doorway are we going in?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I came back. All right. I didn't hear that one. So you've got to repeat that question.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK. Well, I didn't ask it yet.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Oh, OK. Who was it? Conrad?
CONNOR: Connor.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Connor, come on down, Connor.
RICHARD WESLEY: Get down there, Connor Get your picture taken.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Hello, Connor.
CONNOR: Hello, Justice.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Thank you. You ran down from up there? I'm pretty impressed. Thank you.
RICHARD WESLEY: When do you think creativity and imagination are beneficial in work-- in crafting a brief and working as a lawyer?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Ah, that's a fascinating question.
RICHARD WESLEY: There you go, Connor. You rung the bell.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: All right. No, I--
SPEAKER 4: I'm going to go for it.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: You're good. You're very good. Connor, it's so interesting you asked that. In everything you do as a lawyer, you're going to have to prepare a case in a way that takes care of every possible alternative. OK? So whenever I do a case or did case, I ask three questions, which is, what's the nature of the problem? What solution do I think it needs? And number three, what are alternative solutions? Because what's the cost and benefit of the solution I'm thinking about? And is there a better cost-benefit analysis to an alternative?
So when you do that, and you prepare a case thoroughly, and you go into the courtroom, and your witness punks out on you, and he just destroys all of your plan-- happens all the time-- you have to throw away the play book and reconstitute it almost instantaneously.
But having done the preparation, you sort of know what the basis is that you have. And you have a sense of where your creativity and ingenuity can go. And that's what happens with every problem a lawyer gets. When you look at it and you say, mm-mm, my client's going to lose. And you know, in every court case, somebody wins, right? What does that mean?
CONNOR: Somebody loses.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Exactly. Somebody loses. So you have to go in as a lawyer expecting the possibility that you'll lose. And it is that possibility that has to bring out your ingenuity and creativity. All right? It has to make you figure out, even if you think you have a winning case, how do I keep it? How do I pitch it in a way that the trier of fact, the judge or a jury, understands what I'm saying but really wants to give me that win. You know?
Because people don't necessarily all the time want you to win, even when you should win. And so both on the losing and winning end, you have to be thinking creatively. And you have to be thinking with the human dynamic in place. And so for me, it is what being a part of being a lawyer is about. So good luck in finding it in yourself.
SPEAKER 4: Justice Sotomayor, you are such an inspiration. Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
RICHARD WESLEY: You're OK. It's down.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Yeah. OK. I just don't want to fall.
RICHARD WESLEY: No, no. You're OK.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I've already had one bad fall this year. I'm not repeating any.
RICHARD WESLEY: So Sonia--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: All right.
RICHARD WESLEY: What do you do for fun?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I do everything everybody else does. I love the gym. I go to the gym when I can.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah. You always did.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I love cooking, and I love eating. And so I go out with my friends a lot.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah, you're a real foodie.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I'm a--
RICHARD WESLEY: You are a foodie of the highest order.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I love good food. Hello. And about once a month, I play poker with my friends.
RICHARD WESLEY: Ah. I was waiting for that. Do you still play poker with your clerks?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I sure do.
RICHARD WESLEY: I hear you cheat. Is that true?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: That is not true.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I'm just better than they are. That was a joke.
RICHARD WESLEY: Did you get-- did you-- Sonia.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Mm-hmm.
RICHARD WESLEY: She really wants to shake your hand.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Hello. Low
SPEAKER 5: Hi.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Thank you.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK. Our timing is very good.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Is it?
RICHARD WESLEY: Yes.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: So thank you all. Hold on. Go ahead. I know you have another question. Sorry.
RICHARD WESLEY: Careful. Be careful.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: OK. Thank you. Hello, you guys.
RICHARD WESLEY: Is it beer or bourbon?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Bourbon.
RICHARD WESLEY: Bourbon.
[APPLAUSE]
I knew the answer to that question.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Yeah. Yep.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK. We've got just-- we've got just a few minutes left.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: All right.
RICHARD WESLEY: Let's talk about the court just for a second.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Be my guest. I'm bad, you know that. You bring out the worst in me sometimes.
RICHARD WESLEY: You're going to make me tell a story on you if you don't behave yourself. Do you still-- I'm going to switch gears here. Do you still drive?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Mm-hmm.
RICHARD WESLEY: You're the worst driver I've ever met.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I know, you say that. But I probably have less accidents than you do.
RICHARD WESLEY: We went to-- if you're recall, we went to a wake one-- you still-- remember when you had the Jetta?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Yeah.
RICHARD WESLEY: Oh, God. That car was awful.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: That was a tiny little car. You could barely fit in it.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah. And we drove to Connecticut for a wake, remember?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Mm-hmm.
RICHARD WESLEY: And it was a stick shift.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: It was a stick shift.
RICHARD WESLEY: And I volunteered to drive, if you recall.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I know. I didn't trust you.
RICHARD WESLEY: Just saying. Now, you know, at the Second Circuit, you were the social secretary of the Second Circuit. You really were.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I was.
RICHARD WESLEY: You planned. You planned all the court dinners and regularly, in my earlier times when I was an active judge, I would sit Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So I'd have the weekend in New York with Kathy, and I would come down, and then we'd have Monday, Tuesday. And we almost always had brunch with you. And you always found the best places. Are you the social secretary of the Supreme Court?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: No. It's a different institution.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And the reasons for that, I think, are partly that a lot of my colleagues have families now, unlike you who would come down and you would be sitting in New York, so you would be focused and sitting in New York, and would be willing to go out. Your kids were off somewhere else. OK?
RICHARD WESLEY: Right.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Most of my colleagues have family and grandchildren, and they spend a lot of their social time with their family. And the ones who have growing children, they're off to soccer games and all the other things parents do with children. People often ask us what do we talk about at lunch time? We talk about kids, sometimes about movies and books.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And sometimes we make fun of each other in a loving way actually.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: But I don't have the same opportunity. It also is a problem because my colleagues like things that I don't really love.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: They're opera lovers.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah. Yeah, you know, I like RBG too--
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I like jazz.
RICHARD WESLEY: --but that opera stuff leaves me cold.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't mind doing it every once in a while, and I do it every once in a while with one of them. But I'd rather go to jazz. And I can't get any of them to go to jazz with me.
RICHARD WESLEY: They got no funk.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Yeah, they-- that may be true. It's stuff like that. So it's a sort of different-- but we socialize so much.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: There's a limit to how much more you want to do.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Much more than ever I did on any lower court. So for example, I eat lunch with them in a two-week period of sitting five to six times. We have lunch together after Friday conferences.
RICHARD WESLEY: OK.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: We have court activities more often than the court dinners that we used to arrange. So there are dinners throughout the year that we're all present at. We have court functions where everybody shows up-- the Christmas party, the annual barbecue for the staff, you know, and chambers. We have greet the new law clerks every year. The Marshal at the beginning of each term has a breakfast, and so all the justices go to that. I could keep naming things that we do together. There's a point at which you see enough of them. And I say that very lovingly, but it's not the same need.
RICHARD WESLEY: Yeah. I know what you mean. When I was on the New York High Court, you know, we would have dinner together. But we'd never talk about the cases. We would always talk about our families. You come to know about their children and the ups and downs and family life, things like that.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Well, you do things like what everyone does. You go to a funeral, because that's a measure of importance to everyone. You celebrate. We have a luncheon where they sing happy birthday to whichever Justice's birthday it is that week. There are all sorts of things that sort of bring us together in a different way.
RICHARD WESLEY: Were you ready for the celebrity status that attached to your new life?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Not at all. I mean, look. I had been a judge for 17 and 1/2 years before I became a justice. And I understood the attention that Supreme Court justices got on some level.
RICHARD WESLEY: Right.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: But certainly not on the level of attention that I ended up receiving. And in fact, shortly after my nomination process, I was on Amtrak going back to New York, and I was standing behind these two men who were saying to themselves-- talking to themselves-- and they said, why do you think she's gotten so much attention?
RICHARD WESLEY: Ah.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: What accounts for it, and they were going on and on. And I said, I don't know either. So tell me.
RICHARD WESLEY: They just about died, I'll bet.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: They did. They did when they realized who was asking the question. But no, I wasn't prepared for it. And what was it? There was a TV show that the last question was, would you do whatever it is that made you famous, would you do it again if you had the opportunity? And you know, I still struggle with an answer.
RICHARD WESLEY: Really?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: There's a lot you give up as being a Supreme Court Justice.
RICHARD WESLEY: You miss New York, don't you?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: I miss New York. I miss my life in New York. I miss my friends there. I have a life in DC. I'm a resident of DC.
RICHARD WESLEY: Right.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: But it's not the same. And the celebrity status brings with it a lot of joy.
RICHARD WESLEY: But you're so kind. You know, when I was there visiting a year or so ago and we went to dinner, we walked from your place to a restaurant that you'd picked. And we had to have been stopped 15 times. I became the official Sonia Sotomayor photographer. And you were so willing. There's so many young people that stopped you and wanted to have your photograph. And you're so willing to do that. Does it ever get tiresome for you?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: No. Look. A photo is free. All I have to do is smile. No. There are moments where I can't, and I tell people. If I'm in the middle of a supermarket and somebody comes up and says will you give me a picture? My answer is I need to finish my shopping. And if I give one to you, I'll have to give one to the whole store. My alternative is I tell them I'm still shopping. When we're leaving, and if we can go off to a corner outside, I'll take a picture with you. Half the people stay and wait, and half the people leave. But it's a way for me to maintain some normalcy while still trying to be nice to people.
RICHARD WESLEY: What's the single biggest difference in the world of Sonia Sotomayor, the girl at eight to Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court Justice?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Oh, I've never been asked that question. I know how much pain there is in life. The girl who was eight and was taking injections thought it was a pin needle only. The girl who's 64 now knows there's nothing easy about life. But it hasn't taken away my innate optimism.
I really do see the glass always half full. And I don't let it overwhelm the goodness I see in the world. But I've seen evil. I've been a prosecutor. I get cert petitions that I read where people are doing horrifically cruel things to others, things that in my imagination I never thought one human being could do to another. I won't go into lurid details, but the child pornography cases or really the child abuse cases are just something unimaginable.
RICHARD WESLEY: Right.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR: And so I see it, but I recognize we have to work so hard to ensure that it doesn't take away that hope. I still hope.
[APPLAUSE]
RICHARD WESLEY: For those of you that don't know, the Supreme Court is in session. For Justice Sotomayor to come here today to spend time with us has cast her schedule into an extraordinary difficult situation. She comes here, though, to give us her thoughts and a sense of hope that I knew that she would generate for all of us.
You know, on occasion there is a moment in time when one person's accomplishment brings a ray of hope to dreams of millions of Americans, who because of their lot in life, that they just think that those dreams are unattainable. I would submit to you that the nomination and confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor was just such a moment.
Justice Sotomayor, on behalf of Cornell community, all of us at the Cornell community, we all thank you deeply for coming to be with us here in Ithaca. This is a day all of us will cherish and we will long remember, and I ask you to rise for the Justice.
[APPLAUSE]
Eduardo M. Peñalver, AB '94, the Allan R. Tessler Dean and Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, hosts a conversation between Justice Sonia Sotomayor, United States Supreme Court, and Judge Richard C. Wesley, JD '74, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Presented by Cornell Law School and the Office of the President.
