Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor

by Joan Biskupic

  In her early weeks living in a dormitory among wealthy classmates in tony surroundings, Sotomayor fixed her attention on a cricket: “Every night, I tore that room apart looking for the cricket.” When she told her visiting boyfriend, Kevin Noonan, who was earning a degree in science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he laughed because she had not realized that the noisy cricket was outside on a tree branch. The young woman who had grown up with unwelcome cockroaches, not crickets, later wrote, “This was all new to me: we didn’t have trees brushing up against windows in the South Bronx.”12 In the Bronx, trains clattered, police sirens screamed, car horns blared, and people shouted at one another in cramped apartments.

  When Sotomayor registered for classes, she felt even more the outsider. She often recounted an incident involving a woman from Alabama who had followed a succession of relatives to Princeton. As Sotomayor listened to the Alabama native talk of her privileged world, two of Sotomayor’s close friends, one Mexican American, one Puerto Rican, approached, laughing and talking loudly. The woman from Alabama eyed them, Sotomayor recalled, and declared “how wonderful” it was that Princeton “had all these strange people.” This was a new twist on the “those people” phrase Sotomayor had heard many times growing up.

  But the oft-told tale earned a postscript in Sotomayor’s memoir, as she revealed that rather than greet her approaching friends with the English they usually used, she began speaking in Spanish. “I meant no malice toward the girl from Alabama,” Sotomayor wrote, “but my pulse was speeding with a sense of purpose. Nothing more needed to be said.”13 It was her way to even the score.

  When she was admitted to Princeton, only three years after it had allowed women on campus, she did not realize how much her sex or ethnicity had mattered. But several months later the advantage began to dawn on her as she became involved in outreach efforts for other minority students. She recalled her visit to Yale, where she thought it was just a coincidence that two Hispanic students had been assigned to welcome her to the New Haven, Connecticut, campus. In time, she would embrace her experiences with affirmative action and the boost it gave her. She would not find it stigmatizing, as it was to Clarence Thomas, the other minority justice she joined at the Supreme Court. Affirmative action would become central to her success in navigating her way out of the Bronx and passing through the stately buildings of Princeton on her way to the federal bench.

  And she set out to prove she deserved the break she got.

  But first she had to face the fact that, as educationally nurturing as her mother and high school teachers had been, they had not prepared her for Princeton. The Spanish language that dominated her early years stymied her ability to write fluid English. The Encyclopaedia Britannica in her apartment in the Bronxdale Houses could not compare with the well-stocked libraries in the homes of many of her Princeton classmates. She knew nothing of the classics of literature.

  Sotomayor went to a Manhattan bookstore the summer after her first year in search of elementary-grade grammar books and vocabulary builders. “I spent two years, every day, memorizing five new words,” she said, “because I just felt deficient compared to my classmates in my mastery of English. These were things I did just to start feeling as if I belonged a little bit.”14 She read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, and Pride and Prejudice. An English literature professor had taken points off her grade on an essay because Sotomayor had not understood a reference to Lewis Carroll’s classic.

  “Who’s Alice?” she found herself saying.15

  Sotomayor looked for mentors, and she found one in a history professor, Peter Winn, who in her first semester had returned a paper covered with red marks. “He spent the next four years being my tutor,” she recalled. “Every paper I did, he would correct it and teach me something new about what I was doing wrong.” She said he taught her to shed Spanish conventions that had stuck with her. She had to learn to write, for example, “cotton shirt” rather than “shirt of cotton” and “dictatorial authority” rather than “authority of dictatorship.”16

  She did not retreat in humiliation. She did not turn bitter. She developed her own mantra: “How am I not going to let this beat me?” In later years she would tell students, “You have to get up and try again. That’s sometimes really hard to do, when you get embarrassed over failure.”17

  Sotomayor would take five courses with Winn, who later wrote, “She did not radiate charm or magnetism, nor was she polished or cool. But she had an appealing sincerity and directness, and there was something centered about her that was unusual among first-year minority students at Princeton.” Over the years, Winn said, he saw “a tentative teenager—so intimidated that she never spoke in class during her first semester—become a poised young woman who negotiated successfully with top university administrators on contentious issues such as minority hiring practices.”18

  Such activism on behalf of minority employees at Princeton grew out of Sotomayor’s involvement with Acción Puertorriqueña (Puerto Rican Action) and the Third World Center, two groups that attracted like-minded minority students. Established in 1971 in the old Osborn Field House, the homey Third World Center offered newly recruited blacks and Hispanics a refuge from the eating-club culture.

  Sotomayor’s efforts on behalf of minority employees at the university brought her attention beyond campus. When she was a sophomore, and cochairman of the Acción Puertorriqueña, she and other Puerto Rican and Chicano students filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare alleging that the university discriminated against its staff. In an essay for The Daily Princetonian, Sotomayor wrote that there were no Puerto Rican or Chicano administrators or faculty members on campus. This, she said, reflected a “total absence of regard, concern, and respect for an entire people and their culture” and “an attempt—a successful attempt so far—to relegate an important cultural sector of the population to oblivion.”19

  The New York Times published a story of its own at the time, quoting Sotomayor as saying, “Princeton is following a policy of benign neutrality and is not making substantive efforts to change.”20 Sotomayor learned early on the importance of being visible when she raised complaints. A month after the first news stories, a representative of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s Civil Rights Division met with the students and an associate provost about the alleged discrimination.21

  Sotomayor was a product of the rough-and-tumble Bronx, yet she was also her mother’s studious daughter and a creation of the strict Catholic school structure. She believed in process. She went through channels. She did not demonstrate. She did not walk out, as other minorities of her generation did, including some who would one day become friends and allies.

  While Sotomayor was at Princeton typing up complaints, Charles Ogletree, an African American who would become a Harvard law professor and one of those friends, was organizing a graduation walkout at Stanford University. Ogletree was raised in the California Central Valley town of Merced by parents who had grown up in the Jim Crow South and never finished high school. A year before Sotomayor entered Princeton, Ogletree was admitted to Stanford, where he was itching to challenge authority. He described the sixty-eight African American students among the fifteen hundred freshmen in 1971 as standing out and speaking up: “We wore our hair in Afros the size of small planets and donned bell-bottom pants for every occasion. We danced to the music of Earth, Wind and Fire and enjoyed the mellow sounds of Barry White, Isaac Hayes, and Aretha Franklin. We were also in constant search of reasons to protest.”22 In his senior year, Ogletree helped stage a graduation walkout after he and other black students discovered that the commencement speaker would be Daniel Patrick Moynihan, coauthor of Beyond the Melting Pot, a former economic adviser to President Nixon, and then U.S. ambassador to India.

  Ogletree was deeply troubled by Beyond the Melting Pot, which documented the breakup of the black family: “we were the products of the very family structure that t
hey described as a formula for failure.”23

  For Sotomayor, the grounds of a prestigious school were not a place to be defiant, but a place to prove she could rise to the challenge of an academically rigorous curriculum. In her senior year, she shared with another student the M. Taylor Pyne Honor Prize, the highest distinction Princeton conferred on an undergraduate. It was based on academics and community service.24 Sotomayor had the raw grades to back up the honor—she graduated in the top 10 percent of her class and earned a Phi Beta Kappa key.

  Princeton gave her a seal of approval to counteract people who would stereotype her as inferior. Years later, when Senator Moynihan, a recurring figure in her trajectory, was writing about her qualifications to be a judge, he would highlight the Pyne Prize and that Phi Beta Kappa key. President Obama, in his nationally televised announcement of her nomination to the Supreme Court, would also tout her Princeton record. She had gotten her ticket stamped, and she knew it. She would later advise young people to spend money on college, to take out loans, to do whatever was necessary to get a first-rate education and a prestigious degree.

  Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who often complained about the weight of his academic loans, would deliver the opposite message and become one of the strongest public critics of affirmative action. Six years older than Sotomayor, Thomas was embittered by his experience on a similar path from hardship to opportunity. He received a bachelor’s degree from Holy Cross and a law degree from Yale, and he recalled particularly his Yale experience with cynicism. He believed people thought he was admitted only because of his race.

  “It was futile for me to suppose that I could escape the stigmatizing effects of racial preference, and I began to fear that it would be used forever after to discount my achievements,” wrote Thomas, who had trouble finding a job after he graduated from Yale in 1974.25 He said he met a black graduate of the University of Michigan Law School who made a point of not referring to his race on applications. “I wished with all my heart that I’d done the same,” Thomas wrote in his 2007 memoir.

  By then I knew I’d made a mistake in going to Yale. I felt as though I’d been tricked, that some of the people who claimed to be helping me were in fact hurting me … At least southerners were up front about their bigotry: you knew exactly where they were coming from, just like the Georgia rattlesnakes that always let you know when they were ready to strike. Not so the paternalistic big-city whites who offered you a helping hand so long as you were careful to agree with them, but slapped you down if you started acting as if you didn’t know your place.26

  Thomas said he was treated dismissively by a succession of high-priced lawyers at big firms. “Now I knew what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference,” he wrote. “I was humiliated—and desperate. The snake had struck.”27

  Sotomayor’s experience at Yale Law School was not without humiliation and second-guessing because of her ethnicity. She had set her sights on law school, first as a preteen enthralled by the fictional defense lawyer Perry Mason, then as a college student inspired by notions of social justice. Her personal choice came down to Harvard or Yale because, she said, once she had experienced the Ivy League, she would not accept a lesser-ranked alternative. She said she chose Yale over Harvard because the students at the New Haven campus seemed more relaxed and content.

  But, she said, nothing could have prepared “a kid from the South Bronx” for the atmosphere at a law school housed in the Sterling Law Building, an ornate stone structure topped with turrets. She described her Yale classmates as “a different breed of smart.” In her first year, she never raised her hand: “I was too embarrassed and too intimidated to ask questions.”28 She knew that the only way to understand the material was to put in the time with her studies. She gained confidence by participating in mock trials, which drew on her debate-team background from high school.

  She might have felt timid, but she made an immediate impression as gutsy. Professor Guido Calabresi, who later became a federal judge, said she was not the usual “take no chances” first-year law student. “Every once in a while you get a student bursting with ideas, who shows courage. That was Sonia,” he said.29 Reviewing her papers, he would not have to encourage boldness, as he would for the typical risk-averse students. He said his comments would have been more along the lines of “Maybe be a little more careful.” Calabresi and Sotomayor would end up serving on the federal appeals court together, and he would play a strong role in her nomination to the Supreme Court.

  In New Haven, Sotomayor was more comfortable among small groups of friends, and she gravitated toward people with nontraditional backgrounds, whether from housing projects or an Indian reservation. Friends recalled that she became an impromptu bouncer at graduate student parties, keeping out the New Haven locals who wanted to crash their events at the Gypsy Bar. She was tough, and she could handle the door better than the men in their crowd.

  But the bouncer qualities sometimes did not play well back at the Sterling Law Building, where a friend told her that she argued “just like a guy.” Sotomayor acknowledged in her memoir, “I have always argued like a man, more noticeably in the context of those days, when an apologetic and tentative manner of speech was the norm among women.”30

  Through the years, she would often be criticized for her domineering approach. But she rightly calculated that she did not need to change. In an earlier era, it might have cost her. The two women who preceded her at the Supreme Court—Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—projected femininity, in their skirts, jewelry, and other accessories. They were born in the 1930s and attended law school in the 1950s, when it was easier to navigate the system by following conventions of the day.

  While she was at Yale, Sotomayor and her law school friends wondered how long it would take for a woman to reach the Supreme Court. “There were bets being taken whether it would happen in our lifetime [and] … the fact that it was still something we weren’t sure of bespeaks how historic it became that only two years later [O’Connor] was appointed,” Sotomayor recalled of the 1981 milestone. “The doors were opening, but they were very, very small openings.”31

  At Yale, Sotomayor made a crucial connection with José Cabranes, then the university’s general counsel and a lecturer. Fourteen years older than Sotomayor, Cabranes was a Puerto Rican success story. A polished dresser with an intellectual air, he also had street smarts. The son of two educators, he had come to the mainland with his family when he was five, had grown up in the South Bronx and Queens, and had graduated from Columbia College and Yale Law School. Cabranes spoke proudly of his heritage and the importance of Puerto Ricans becoming active players in their new home. “Those of us who migrated in the modern era to the continental United States did so because we or our parents or our grandparents sought to become a part of American society—most particularly to become part of the mainstream of American society,” he wrote. “We did not uproot ourselves from our native lands and come to America in search of a permanent place at the margins.”32 In 1979 he would become the first Puerto Rican appointed to a federal trial court within the continental United States.

  Sotomayor and Cabranes met shortly before she began classes in New Haven, when she accompanied a Princeton friend who was writing about Puerto Ricans’ citizenship and had obtained an interview with Cabranes. During the three-hour luncheon session, Sotomayor and Cabranes did most of the talking. When it was over, he offered her a research job. “I accepted, and José became my first legal employer, then my mentor and career adviser,” she said.33 He liked that she exhibited none of the diffidence associated with the Puerto Rican stereotype. And she liked that he was a successful lawyer who had held on to his identity as a New York City Puerto Rican. He became her model. Years later, when they were equals on the federal bench, their interests would diverge. As she began to displace him as the Hispanic who seemed most likely to be chosen for the Supreme Court, their rivalry would become the subject of intense public c
uriosity.

  Another man in Sotomayor’s life, Kevin Noonan, her longtime boyfriend, might at one point have appeared ready to play an enduring role, too. At the start of law school, she married him. She had planned to wait until her late twenties, vowing not to repeat the mistakes of aunts and cousins who married young and saw their marriages sour. But in 1976, when she was twenty-two and about to start law school, she and Noonan decided to live together. In her socially conservative Catholic world, Sotomayor said, that could not happen unless they married. Because her brother, Juan junior, held a job as a sacristan at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, cleaning items used at the altar, they were able to hold the ceremony in a chapel at the Roman Catholic landmark that was the site of many grand celebrity nuptials.

  She began using the name Sonia Sotomayor de Noonan, following the Spanish convention. With his science degree from SUNY–Stony Brook, Noonan obtained a job as a laboratory assistant in Yale’s biology department. Sharing domestic duties, Sotomayor cooked and Noonan cleaned. As she burrowed into her studies and extracurricular efforts, he never complained, she said, that she was away too much.

  Only later would Sotomayor realize that she was more committed to her work than to him. The marriage would last seven years.

  * * *

  As Sotomayor entered her final year of law school, she began thinking about her career options. During a recruitment dinner in October 1978, an exchange with a partner from a Washington-based law firm would expose the suspicions that she constantly confronted. The partner from Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge had graduated from Yale in 1965 and joined the firm in 1968. He lured considerable business to the firm and was admired by colleagues, but he also exuded an air of superiority and was known for making impolitic remarks. At the recruiting dinner, with about ten people around the table, he sat across from Sotomayor and grilled her: Do you believe in affirmative action? Would you have been admitted to Yale if you were not Puerto Rican? Do law firms do themselves and young lawyers a disservice by hiring minority students who the firms believe lack the necessary credentials and whom they likely will have to fire? His questions reflected the growing opposition to policies intended to bring diversity to the nation’s campuses and workplaces.34