My Beloved World

by Sonia Sotomayor

  The sense of failure was confirmed when I concluded my stint as a summer associate without receiving a job offer. I had never heard of such a thing happening at Yale Law School, and though I’ve learned since it was not so uncommon, of course no one advertised it. But anyway, in my own eyes I had officially blown it. I had worked hard—I always had and still do—but somehow that wasn’t enough. And it was difficult not to conclude that I was simply not in the same league as my classmates who were pulling in job offers from firms just like this one. There were some around me encouraging me to view the rejection as an expression of bias or personal animus, but I had seen no evidence of that, while my sense of having underperformed seemed to me well enough substantiated. For this pain of failure—the first real failure since having enrolled in law school—I had only myself to blame, and knowing that, I was profoundly shaken.

  The way forward was daunting if obvious. I needed to figure out what I was doing wrong and fix it. At the very least I had to learn this area of law, and so I signed up for Professor Ralph Winter’s class on antitrust as well as one called Commercial Transactions. The trickier part would be mastering the skill that was at the heart of being a lawyer, my deficiency in which had been exposed: how to write a brief, not as some classroom exercise aspiring to an objective analysis of the case law, but as a piece of persuasive advocacy, advancing the interests of my client. In both kinds of remedial efforts, I would do what I’d always done: break the challenge down into smaller challenges, which I could get on with in my methodical fashion. And certainly I would need to prove myself at another kind of work in the legal profession before I could even consider joining a large commercial firm. In the meantime, the unfamiliar taste of utter failure from that summer would stay in my mouth. The memory of this trauma, which I was determined not to repeat, while not suffocating my ambitions, would overhang my every career choice until I became a judge.

  ONE OBVIOUS GOOD did come of my ordeal at Paul, Weiss: I made more money that summer than I had ever seen before. Now Kevin and I could actually afford a honeymoon, and a change of scene seemed in order as I licked my wounds and considered the way forward. Soon dreams of America were unfolding across our living room floor as we planned to cross the continent and head west.

  Carol Green, a close friend from my study group, was a journalist from Denver visiting Yale for a yearlong program on law and journalism. She invited us on a camping tour down into New Mexico, Four Corners, the Grand Canyon … She and her husband were old hands at this, equipped with all the right gear and experienced at roughing it. The appeal of sleeping under the stars, protected by nothing but a tarpaulin and far from the safety of civilization, eluded me then and still does. But Kevin, no less a city kid than I, was eager to try it, and so we did. There was so much that I had wanted to see for so long, so many sights that would inspire a pilgrim’s awe, that I wasn’t going to complain about the want of a few urban comforts.

  For years I had studied American history, law, and society, but I had barely scratched the surface of the great geographical reality. What I knew of this land was a library’s worth of cases, treaties, the shifting tides of politics, human migrations, and technologies. The natural wonders I recognized only from childhood picture books and the plates of our Britannica, but it was something else altogether to watch the vast stretches of forest and plain unfurl for hours along the highway, or to feel dwarfed by the immensity of the sky. As we headed south out of Denver, the Rocky Mountains lay to the west like bones of the continent exposed to the afternoon light. As the road ran straight and flat, my mind rambled along its own bumpy, winding course. Two-thirds of the way through law school, and everyone around me was considering job offers. I needed to figure something out.

  Most of my classmates were aiming in the direction of prestigious midtown law firms, including Rudy, whose objective couldn’t have been more unvarnished: make big bucks. If the shortest path to that goal was to defend corporations in massive tort cases and antitrust litigation, then so be it. He could always pursue labors of love by doing pro bono work on the side. My own ambitions were not as susceptible to the same inducements, but I did recognize a greater good in Rudy’s approach. Until minorities learned how to navigate at those altitudes of the legal system, their communities would lag the rest of the country. If our experience as a group was ever to advance beyond disadvantage and grievance, we needed to move with ease where money and power move.

  The splat of raindrops on the windshield interrupted my reverie. Surely we now had to find a motel. No way was I sleeping out in the rain, pitching a tent in a puddle. “Let’s see if it passes,” said Carol. She’s got to be kidding, I thought, as a bolt of lightning cracked the sky open and electrocuted the mountains.

  My ruminations continued through the days of driving, as if the white line in the road were an arrow pointing toward the future. José Cabranes had advised me to keep my sights on a major law firm in the long term, saying it was a good platform from which to launch into government or any other direction, but that first of all I should clerk. I had heard classmates mention clerking and I knew it was prestigious, but José had to explain to me that it meant working, essentially as a researcher, for a judge. Though I knew he wanted the best for me, clerking sounded tediously academic. How much longer could I live in the library? If I was wary of going to a big firm, I still felt the need to get out in the real world and earn some money.

  Much later I would realize my naïveté. Especially working with my own clerks, I’ve come to appreciate how clerking for a judge can be the most vital mentoring relationship open to a young lawyer. It has become even more prestigious over the years since I left law school and the most direct stepping-stone to higher levels of legal practice. Many minority students and others who struggle under financial pressure sacrifice the long-term benefits of clerking for better pay in the near term. I advise them to resist that temptation and aim for the necessary grades, journal experience, and mentoring relationships with professors that can open the door to a clerkship. Part of me still regrets not having taken José’s advice at face value.

  When we rolled to a crunchy graveled stop and cut the engine, the silence of the desert was complete. The ruins of a Pueblo village were visible halfway up a cliff, nooks and crannies revealing themselves as we walked. You could see traces of daily life in the contours carved into the mountain, the footholds for climbing out of enemies’ reach, the cistern to capture precious rainwater. I tried to populate the village in my mind and imagined myself looking out from a window of that cliff-side aerie to the desert expanse. The only moving feature in the landscape was the light itself and the slow shadow of clouds piled in the distance. The wind was a constant, and when you paid attention, it seemed like the earth’s own breathing.

  One possibility I’d long had in mind was the State Department. I was fascinated by Professor Michael Reisman’s course Public Order of the World Community, as well as my glimpse of international law working with José on his book about the Puerto Rican status problem and citizenship, and also exploring the narrower question of maritime rights in my journal note. As tiny as Puerto Rico is, studying maritime issues had given me a taste of what it might be like to work on the exceptionally complex intellectual puzzles of international law, whose solutions have very real consequences for millions of people. And the idea of public service on a big stage appealed to me deeply.

  Of course, such thoughts might all be moot: Kevin was applying to medical schools and graduate programs, and when I finished at Yale, it would be his turn to decide where we would live among the places where he was accepted. At least Washington was on his list of possibilities.

  I had not forgotten my childhood dream of becoming a judge, but if law school had taught me anything, it was what pure fantasy that dream would have to remain. Even at Yale, there was no such thing as a “judge track” to prepare you specifically for the rigors of those heights of the legal profession. I could see that it was a matter of accumulating a b
road range of legal experience in positions that are challenging and respected and, eventually, being visible to those who could offer a nomination. And still, luck and timing would play their inscrutable roles. The relative scarcity of women on the bench and the practical nonexistence of Latinas also gave me reason to keep this idea in the drawer with other idle wishes, any expression of which would have marked me as delusional.

  Kevin and I made a detour to Albuquerque to visit Dolores, whom I hadn’t seen since Princeton. She was so much more at ease on home turf. Her family’s modest house reminded me of Puerto Rico, with her father, mother, and three sisters filling the small rooms with their laughter and chatter. And I discovered that Dolores hadn’t been the only one their father had taught to sing and play guitar; all Mr. Chavez’s daughters made music together. As half-familiar smells drifted in from the kitchen—roasting peppers and cumin, caramelizing onions, the earthy steam of beans—as well as others I couldn’t identify, the guitars got passed around. For me, the most precious memory of the evening was hearing Dolores and her father’s duet of “Cucurrucucú Paloma.” In that gentle exchange, the handing of the melody back and forth between them, I recognized again how very far from home she had felt at Princeton.

  We flew on to San Francisco for the final leg of the trip, a visit with Ken Moy, who was living in Berkeley with Patricia Kristof, with whom he’d been a couple since Princeton. There was a sense of completion in seeing a sunset on the Pacific Coast, and it felt equally fitting to close out the trip with the touchstone of very old friendship. Celebration was in order. I accompanied Ken to the market, where he chose things I’d never seen before: passion fruit and butternut and spaghetti squash. He cooked up a feast, and I marveled to see him so happy in a home, and a family, of his own creation, a long way from East Harlem.

  AT THE ALL-STAR BREAK in 1978, the Yankees lagged a dozen or so games behind the Red Sox, and yet there was no question but that I’d be betting on them to win the American League East. My hometown loyalties run deeper than any season’s ups and downs, and while I’ll root for the underdog in many other arenas, when it comes to baseball, the Yankees’ knack for setting aside the day’s personal dramas to get out there and win always impresses me. Felix, as a New Yorker, was with me of course, and Drew was shrewdly calculating the odds. But Rudy and George were backing the Red Sox out of sheer contrariness, and so I arranged that when the Yankees won the pennant, those guys would buy me dinner at the best restaurant in New Haven.

  It was the top of the seventh in the final, tie-breaking game. The Yankees had two men on when Bucky Dent, a shortstop with no hitting power in his history, came up to bat. The bat cracks, like a sign from heaven. He takes a new bat, and when it kisses the ball, a hand reaches down from the sky and lifts it out of the park. There’s an eerie silence over Boston as Bucky Dent crosses home plate. All hell broke loose. Rudy and George were screaming in agony, Felix was crowing like the sun just rose, I was sitting there shaking my head, saying over and over, “They did it! They pulled it out again!”

  My winner’s dinner would have to wait till another night, however, even if we hadn’t already felt stuffed to bursting on Felix’s feast of picadillo with rice and black beans—the best I’d had since Papi died. Though nothing would have made me happier than to stay right there, basking in the glow of victory and friendship, I had to pull myself together for a recruiting dinner that same night. The host was Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge, a well-respected, small Washington firm that did varied corporate and international work. Scott Rafferty, who had graduated summa cum laude alongside me at Princeton before also coming to Yale, had worked there as a summer associate and loved the experience. He enthusiastically encouraged me to attend the dinner.

  There were eight or ten of us at a large table, and I happened to be seated facing the partner who was steering the event. Scott made introductions, circling the table with a few words about each of us. “Sonia’s Puerto Rican and from the South Bronx in New York. She was at Princeton before she came to Yale.” Very few words, as it happened, but as students we didn’t have long résumés.

  As soon as the introductions were over, and before another word was spoken, the partner facing me asked whether I believed in affirmative action. “Yes,” I said, somewhat guarded but hardly imagining what my answer would unleash.

  “Do Princeton and Yale have affirmative action programs?” Yes, of course they do, I told him, at which the challenge only escalated: “Do you believe law firms should practice affirmative action? Don’t you think it’s a disservice to minorities, hiring them without the necessary credentials, knowing you’ll have to fire them a few years later?”

  I was stunned, as much by the bald rudeness of the interrogation as by its implications. I’d heard nothing of the kind so blatant since the school nurse caught me off guard at Cardinal Spellman. “I think that even someone who got into an institution through affirmative action could prove they were qualified by what they accomplished there.”

  He looked at me skeptically. “But that’s the problem with affirmative action. You have to wait to see if people are qualified or not. Do you think you would have been admitted to Yale Law School if you were not Puerto Rican?”

  “It probably didn’t hurt,” I said. “But I imagine that graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton had something to do with it too.”

  “Well, do you consider yourself culturally deprived?”

  Gee, Officer Krupke, I thought, how do I explain? Shall I talk about my ancestors, the heritage of Spain? About having two languages, two ways of seeing the world? Is there only one culture that counts? I didn’t even know where to begin answering that one. And an awkward silence descended upon us, before spreading like a stain to the other end of the table, where Scott was seated. Sensing the discomfort, he deftly jumped in with a new topic. My adrenaline ebbed slowly, and I did what I could to get through the rest of the dinner without making others more uncomfortable. Afterward, Scott came to me to express outrage and apologize.

  “It was horrible,” I admitted. “So insulting.”

  “It was completely out-of-bounds,” he said, adding he intended to complain about it the next day. But I asked him to wait. I needed to figure out what to do.

  In the cafeteria the next morning, Scott had already found Rudy, Felix, and George. The forces were marshaled, the coffee flowing.

  “I would have punched him out,” Rudy announced, rarely one not to verbalize a thought.

  “This guy was a lot bigger than me; I don’t think I could have taken him,” I said.

  But when we got more serious about considering a proper response, I decided to go ahead with the formal recruiting interview scheduled later that same day, at which I could engage the partner from Shaw, Pittman in a more private setting.

  With my résumé in front of him, he seemed to think that we were on a cordial footing. Before I knew it, he was encouraging me to come to Washington for the next step in the hiring process. That’s when I called him on what he had said at the dinner.

  “That was really insulting. You presumed that I was unqualified before you had seen my résumé or taken the trouble to learn anything about me.”

  He seemed to be waving it off as just a conversational gambit, albeit on a sensitive topic, and he expressed admiration at how I had stood my ground.

  “You didn’t seem terribly upset. You didn’t make a scene. You were perfectly civil.”

  Now I really couldn’t believe my ears. What was he expecting, Hysterical Puerto Rican Syndrome?

  “That was the Latina in me,” I said. “We’re taught to be polite.” If we were going to rely on stereotypes, at least they should be accurate. I further explained that it wasn’t in my nature to cause everyone at the table discomfort because of how I felt about his behavior. But neither was I simply going to accept being treated so unfairly. I’ve long known how to control my anger, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.

  After the interv
iew I talked through my options with the gang. I decided to address a formal complaint to the firm through the university’s career office and challenge Shaw, Pittman’s right to recruit on campus in light of that partner’s disregard for Yale’s antidiscrimination policy.

  “You’re going to need counsel, Sonia,” Rudy said. “You’re going to need one tough lawyer.”

  “You’re hired,” I said. “Pro bono, I assume.”

  “I think ‘jailhouse lawyer’ is the correct term,” said Felix. Bluster aside, Rudy was the one who came to meetings with the dean and to the ensuing formal hearings of a student-faculty tribunal.

  News of the incident flared across campus and divided the school into camps—those who thought I had made too much of some offhand comments, jeopardizing Yale’s relationship with an important employer of its graduates, and those who were solidly in support of my action. The latter view spread far beyond New Haven as word reached one minority student group after another across the country. Letters and news clippings describing similar affronts elsewhere started to arrive. Clearly, I had opened a bigger can of worms than I’d intended. For while I was pleased that this type of offensive behavior was being brought to light, I had no wish for personal notoriety, as a symbol or anything else. I still wanted a career in law, not a place on every firm’s blacklist.

  The university, clearly uncomfortable with the attention the complaint was drawing, was eager to reach a settlement. The student-faculty tribunal impaneled to investigate the complaint negotiated a full apology from Shaw, Pittman. They were not barred from recruiting, but the firm and the offending partner did voluntarily keep a low profile at Yale for a time.