SONIA SOTOMAYOR on Civics and Civic Education
“When you are asked to serve, there is a moral compulsion to serve your country. To be a federal judge is service as a lawyer, the most service that you can do for your country.”
On August 6, 2009, after an appointment by President Barack Obama, Sonia Sotomayor became only the third woman in the country’s long history to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, and the first justice with Latinx heritage. She also embodied the classic American Dream story: the daughter of blue-collar Puerto Rican parents; raised by her mother after her father’s premature death; a summa cum laude Princeton graduate (when there were very few Puerto Ricans from the Bronx at Princeton); winner of the Pyne Prize, the highest honor awarded to a Princeton undergraduate; a Yale Law School graduate; a U.S. district court judge at the age of thirty-eight, appointed by George H. W. Bush (a Republican president); and a U.S. court of appeals judge at the age of forty-four, appointed by Bill Clinton (a Democratic president).
Like her two female predecessors on the court, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sotomayor has tried to lead a normal life, staying in contact with close friends and avoiding the often isolated life that is possible for a justice. Her outgoing, gregarious personality would probably make an isolated life almost impossible for her.
Justice Sotomayor has also tried to follow one of her predecessors, Justice O’Connor, in another way. After leaving the court, Justice O’Connor helped to start iCivics, a nonprofit designed to help students—through the use of online games—learn more about civics. She felt strongly that civics education had been pushed aside in the American school curriculum, and thought the result increasingly was citizens who are largely uninformed about basic information about government and civic responsibilities. Justice Sotomayor shares that concern, and as a result has joined the board of iCivics.
The need for better civics education was the principal topic of my interview with Justice Sotomayor, whom I have known for a number of years and previously interviewed. The interview was part of a 2021 leadership series being held virtually between Mount Vernon and the Brookings Institution.
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Was it clear from your early days that you wanted to be a lawyer?
SONIA SOTOMAYOR (SS): It was, but for reasons that weren’t self-evident. I grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx, and there were no lawyers or judges in the projects in which I lived.
But when I was seven, I developed diabetes. It’s not so true now, but back then, if you had juvenile diabetes, which I did, you were not permitted to become a law enforcement agent. And that’s what I wanted to become, a detective, because of Nancy Drew. The first chapter books I began to read, at about seven and a half or eight years old, were Nancy Drew mysteries.
By the time I was ten, Perry Mason appeared on TV. He was the first TV lawyer, and the first lawyer about whom TV ran a weekly series. From him I learned of the work of lawyers. And I began to think about that as a potential alternative to being a detective, because Perry Mason spent the first half of his show investigating the crime his client was charged with, and the second half in court proving his client was innocent. I thought, “Gee, that might marry the two skills that I really admire—playing sleuth to a mystery, and liking to talk a lot.”
DR: When you were growing up in the Bronx, in junior high school and high school, did you get very much civic education? Do you feel that you learned a lot about the way our government works at that time?
SS: Nothing. I was an early product of the change in the country. When Sputnik was launched by Russia, the United States had an immediate visceral reaction that it was behind in technology and science and that we needed to catch up. What started to happen after Sputnik in the 1960s is that the country became much more concerned with STEM education, as it should have been. It is an important issue that needed correcting in our country at the time.
But one of the things that began to suffer was civic education. There’s only a certain number of hours in a school day, and if you were going to load up more on STEM subjects, you had to reduce other subjects. Most schools began to forgo civic education. And that, I think, was a great detriment to our country.
DR: When you became a member of the United States Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was already a member of the court, and you had a chance to get to know her. Did she talk about her interest in civic education? When did you get so interested in this?
SS: When I joined the court, Sandra Day O’Connor had stepped down as an active member. As most people may know, she was the first female justice on the Supreme Court, and she was appointed in 1981. It was a momentous time for me because I had just graduated from law school in 1979, two years earlier, and at the time there were no women on the Supreme Court. There were no women on the highest court of my state, New York, the court of appeals. And women were still a fraction of the judges throughout the country—a tiny, tiny fraction.
When Sandra was appointed, it was such a beacon of hope for me. An idea formed in my head that my future wasn’t limited the way I thought at first it might be, that I had the potential to achieve other things in life besides just being a working lawyer, which is not unimportant, but that I could aspire myself to do something like becoming a judge eventually.
Sandra took senior status [a form of retirement], and she had decided that there were two things she wanted to commit to doing. One was educating the public about the dangers of electing judges. She thought that judges participating in elections might be tempted to make promises to voters that they should not keep, because judges are required to keep an open mind in all cases.
But the second, and probably the more important, object of her education of the public was civic education. She had seen that civic education had declined in school. She had also seen that civics was being taught in a really boring way. What are the three branches of government? Who’s the president? Who’s the vice president? How many senators are there? How many people in the House of Representatives? It was filled with facts, but not with understanding about what our civic process was about.
Sandra believed, having watched the decline of civic discourse in our country, that was directly tied to the time in which civic education had declined in the U.S. She became committed to starting an organization called iCivics.org, which uses game-playing to teach kids about civics in a creative and innovative way. It has reached over 7.5 million students, and over 120,000 teachers are using iCivics to engage kids in learning about our republican form of government and about their role in participating in that government.
Sandra’s involvement in civic education dovetailed with my own aim of devoting my time on the Supreme Court to educating students on the importance of civic participation. You cannot participate in something you do not know about.
I tell students all the time, “It is your obligation to learn about your system of government. But more importantly, it’s your obligation not to be a bystander in life, but to become an active participant in understanding how you can better your community.”
That is what civic participation is about. You do not have to be a politician and you do not have to be involved in politics, but you do have to be involved in improving the world you are in.
DR: Is the biggest problem getting money from governments to fund civic education programs in schools, or is it getting students interested in this subject?
SS: The lack of resources that we put into civic education is a significant problem. We put fifty dollars per student per year into STEM classes. We put five cents per student into civic education. That disparity is way off, given how important civic education is to making better students. There is a tremendous amount of social science research that shows that students who become involved in civic education and civic participation overall become better students.
But the very first problem, and the most significant, is that neither our government nor our citizens understand the importance of civic education. Ignorance of what our laws mean, ignorance of what our society needs in terms of functioning and being vibrant, is our biggest problem right now. We have to educate students, but in some ways we have to educate ourselves as adults and as citizens. I do not mean citizens with a capital C, as in are you a citizen of the United States, but are you what I call a citizen with a small c? Are you a citizen of your community? Do you understand that to keep it healthy, to keep it flourishing, we have to work together? What civic involvement means is figuring out ways to work together to make a more perfect union.
DR: It’s interesting that one of the only times in the United States where one has to actually know something about civics is if you’re a naturalized-citizen candidate. Was your mother a naturalized citizen?
SS: No, because she was born in Puerto Rico, and under a 1917 law called the Jones Act, Puerto Ricans are born U.S. citizens as soon as they move to the mainland. So when she came over in World War II, she was considered and is an American citizen.
DR: For those who are born, let’s say, somewhere else, if you want to be a U.S. citizen after roughly five years of residency, you have to take a citizenship test. Out of a hundred potential questions, you’re asked, I think, ten of them. And you have to get six correct. Amazingly, 91 percent of the people who take it pass. But when the same test was given to native-born Americans not long ago, as you know, in forty-nine out of fifty states and the District of Columbia, the majority failed. So it’s a sad situation.
SS: That is a very sad situation.
DR: Let me ask you about what judges and justices do toward civic education. For hundreds of years, judges have written opinions, which explain why they made their decisions. I assume that’s to some extent about civic education—coming up with a reasoning to justify your decision. Is that how you look at that? Or it’s different than civic education?
SS: There is a civic education component to judicial writing. We are explaining the reasons why we are coming to our conclusions, so that is always educational. In particular, when you have a majority opinion and you have a dissenting opinion, you get to see two sides of the issue. And you get to see in writing how people can disagree about something but still engage with each other’s thinking. So that’s an important educational process.
But one of my colleagues, Justice Stephen Breyer, has written a book about making a democracy, in which he argues that our decision-making is there to ensure that people continue to respect the judiciary. Opinion-writing is our way of explaining to the public why the law requires what it does. That is educational, but it also serves another function—ensuring the legitimacy of the courts, that we are not a monarchy, we are not making up rules, we are following the law as we the justices best understand it.
DR: I was surprised to read that when our first president, George Washington, appointed the first chief justice, John Jay, he had so little to do in the first two years. He was practicing law and negotiating treaties on the side. Can you imagine how that possibly could happen today?
SS: I do not think it would. Do you know that Jay did not want to become chief justice? He had to be talked into it. And if I understand the historical lore, he was placed in that position to get him out as competition for running for president in the future. It did not quite work long-term.
But the point is that at the very beginning, we were thirteen colonies who had become thirteen states. The amount of business for the court was very small. It was also difficult to do. To become a justice, you had to travel the circuits, the different states, by horseback, so it was physically demanding as well. Over time, as the country grew, so did the legal problems, and with it, I think, so did the importance of the court.
DR: As you were beginning your career, you graduated from Yale Law School and then you became a prosecutor working for Robert Morgenthau [then the Manhattan district attorney]. How did that come about? Did you always want to be a prosecutor, or did you have an inspiration to want to work for him?
SS: Perry Mason. Going back to the TV show, that was my initial motivation for becoming a lawyer. In one episode, [Hamilton] Burger, the long-suffering prosecutor who always lost to Perry Mason, met him at a restaurant after he had proven his client not guilty. Perry said to Berger something along the lines of “I know how hard you worked on this case. It must feel a little frustrating to have lost to me.” And Burger said, “Yes, I worked hard on the case, but as a prosecutor, I am always seeking justice. And justice means for me that the persons who are guilty are proven guilty, and the people who are not guilty are let free. You proved that the defendant was not guilty, so justice was done.”
And I remembered those words when I went through law school. I was not planning then to become a prosecutor. I was following the path of most of my law school friends, who were thinking of joining a law firm. But in my third year, after a chance meeting with the then-legendary Robert Morgenthau at Yale Law School, he invited me to come interview with him, which I did. And the rest is history, because I became convinced that maybe my original thought of becoming a prosecutor was not a bad idea.
DR: You wrote in your book about your life story [My Beloved World], which was a best-seller a few years ago, that it was complicated for you, because you were often prosecuting people who came from the same type of neighborhood that you did. You kind of knew the families, in effect, and it was difficult to prosecute those people. Is that a fair statement?
SS: That is a fair statement. It was an emotionally difficult choice. Most of my friends who came from backgrounds like my own felt that people accused of crimes were often not treated fairly in the legal system. They considered it inappropriate for me to think about becoming a prosecutor, and that I should consider becoming a defense attorney instead. I did think about their viewpoint, but I realized for myself that Hamilton Burger’s statement—that what prosecutors do is seek justice—had to be my guiding light as a prosecutor. Those who were guilty should be prosecuted and treated fairly under the law and in accordance with the rules of law. And that with those who were not guilty, I had to work just as hard to prove them not guilty. I was a prosecutor who had one of the highest records in my office for top-count convictions, meaning the very top count instead of plea-bargaining it down. I would go to trial and prove those people guilty.
But I also had a fairly high number of dismissals of cases, where I thought that the proof was inadequate to prove the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I describe some of those situations in my book.
There is a misunderstanding about the role of lawyers in the judicial system. You are not favoring one side or another when you become a prosecutor or a defense attorney. Both prosecutors and defense attorneys are serving justice. We are each doing our job.
The prosecutor represents the people of the state. The defense attorney represents the defendant. Each of us is ensuring that our legal system is properly working. We are really partners in a common pursuit, and too often people see us as enemies. That is an attitude that should be changed.
DR: I practiced law for a few years in New York, and nobody ever called me up and said, “You know, you should be a judge someday.” It never happened, and there was a good reason for that. I wasn’t that good a lawyer. But when you practiced law, eventually a number of people recommended you to be a judge. How do you get to be recommended for judge? Who picks federal judges?
SS: Let me start by saying that all federal judges are nominated by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. When I say “all federal judges,” I mean district, circuit, and Supreme Court justices.
Every president has a slightly different way of picking their judges. For the longest time, the president would take recommendations from the senators of his state for district court judges, the trial-level judges. Senators of each state, particularly if they were of the same party as the president, could nominate people for the president to consider.
DR: When you’re a nominee, who actually interviews you?
SS: Each senator has his or her own method of selecting people. Some senators have a committee of lawyers and academics and other community leaders who interview people seeking nomination and ask them questions. They then make recommendations to the senator, who will likely interview those candidates. Other senators have different ways of doing it and may rely on individuals they know or on staff members. Every senator does it slightly differently. I’m not familiar with all hundred senators’ practices today, but a lot of them have review committees of one sort or another.
Once the senator recommends you, every president has a different committee that decides who is going to review each nominee. It is generally someone from the Department of Justice, one or more people from the White House counsel’s office, or it could just be an advisor the president trusts with respect to nominations. Again, every president picks his or her own method of selecting who they will nominate.
DR: And how does the court of appeals work? Is that slightly different?
SS: That is slightly different, because as a matter of course, historically, presidents will consider the views of senators—but only consider them, meaning their priority is different for the court of appeals. There are only about two hundred court of appeals judges and there are seven hundred or eight hundred district court judges. For the court of appeals, again, every president has a committee of some sort made up of people from the White House counsel’s office, the Department of Justice, and advisors of various kinds, and they get together and supply recommendations to the president.
DR: You were appointed by President Clinton to the court of appeals. Is it unusual to have a Republican president appoint you to one position and then a Democratic president appoint you to another position?
SS: Very unusual. Only a handful of judges and justices have had that happen in their careers.
DR: When you were appointed to the federal district court judgeship, I assume you told your mother about it and she said terrific things. Did you tell her how low the compensation is?
SS: Yes. Senator Moynihan gave me permission to tell my parents that he was going to send my name to the president. He asked me to wait before making a public announcement until he first announced it, but he gave me permission to tell my mother and my then-stepfather.
They came to my home in Brooklyn and I told them, “Senator Moynihan is going to appoint me to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.” My mother’s custom her entire life has been that every time I get excited, she gets excited. She does not know what has happened, but she gets excited. She did not know what was happening then, and she said to me, “That is wonderful. You are going to make a lot more money, aren’t you?” I looked at her and I said, “Mommy, no. I am going to make less money. I am going to take a pay cut. Judges don’t make as much as practicing lawyers, and I won’t get raises for a very long time.” And in fact I had to be on the court for more than fifteen years before I got my first raise.
At any rate, she then looks at me and she says, “That is all right, but you are going to travel as much as you do now, right?” My practice had consisted of international commercial litigation, and I had some very famous clients in Europe and around the world. I had traveled extensively in private practice. And my response to her was, “Well, Mommy, no. My office will be in downtown Manhattan in a courtroom. I really will not travel. People come to me for me to hear their cases as a judge.”
I can see her wheels turning in her head, and she looks at me and she says, “Okay, but you’re going to meet and befriend as many interesting people as you do now, right? All these famous fashion designers, all of these people involved in wonderful industries around the world, they’ll become your friends too.” And I looked at her and I said, “No, Mommy, the people who come before me want me to be impartial. So I can’t become friendly with them. I won’t have the same kinds of relationships I had before.”
She finally looked at me and said, after pondering this for a few seconds, “So why are you taking this job?” Interestingly enough, her husband, Omar, said, “Celina, you have to know that if Sonia’s excited and she wants to do it, it’s because it’s something important to do and she will help people doing it.” My mom looked at him and said, “You’re right. I should know that.” It is a perfect explanation of my mother being excited for me, but not always fully understanding why.
DR: How do you prepare for an interview with the president of the United States for an associate justice position? Do you stay up all night preparing?
SS: I called a bunch of friends who had been involved in other administrations to ask them the kinds of questions that tended to be asked during this process. This was a different president. It was President Obama, and this was his first nomination, so no one could tell me what questions his people were likely to ask. But I understood that there was a process, and that there was a likelihood that some questions would be the same over different presidential administrations.
I then sent out an e-mail to my family of law clerks—over seventy of them at the time—and asked them to think of questions I might be asked and issues that I should consider, and to provide me with any reading materials they thought might be helpful to prepare me. I called up some professor friends and asked them to make a list for me of the issues they thought were currently most important before the Supreme Court. I knew what I thought was important, but academics are studying it from a different angle, and so I thought, “Let me get the academics to tell me what they think is important.”
The preparation is the way it should be for any job you undertake. You should be talking to other people who have gone through the process, understanding what the job entails before you go in for an interview, and thinking about what your position is on issues that might arise.
DR: When you were interviewed by President Obama, a man who had been the president of the Harvard Law Review, did you tell him why you decided not to go to Harvard Law School and went to Yale Law School instead?
SS: He never asked, believe it or not. Although he did say that the one thing he almost held against me was that I was a Yankees fan.
DR: He was a Chicago Cubs fan.
SS: Exactly.
DR: There’s a famous picture of you being sworn in. Your mother is there, holding a family Bible. What is it like to have your mother see you being sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Court?
SS: There is nothing more amazing in one’s life than to go further than your dreams. As I explained to you, when I was a child, I never dreamt of being a lawyer, never mind being a Supreme Court justice. I didn’t know what that was.
To get to a point where I had achieved something so extraordinary, and being given the gift of sharing that with the most important person in my life, my mother, was such a deeply felt moment. Most of us do not have the privilege of having parents alive at the end of our careers, or at points in our career where we achieve the most. I am eternally grateful that my mom was there.
DR: The salary you get as an associate justice of the Supreme Court is not all that much higher than the salary you got many years ago as a federal district judge. Why is there so little corruption in the federal judiciary system when people are paid so little money, and why are so many people still interested in being judges? Is it because they really want to serve their country?
SS: When you are asked to serve, there is a moral compulsion to serve your country. To be a federal judge is service as a lawyer, the most service that you can do for your country.
You ask a very important question that I have asked in many lectures in which I have talked about judicial ethics. In our country, we take for granted that we have the lowest amount of judicial corruption in the world. We don’t pay our judges enough. We pay our federal judges very little. We pay most of our state judges even less. Now, one could always point to a few corruption cases that have been prosecuted, but by and large, we are, in the world, the most respected judicial system. That is because, as a nation, we have insisted on that level of commitment to the rule of law.
DR: If people want to do more for civic education, what can they do? What can an average person do?
SS: Educate yourself. In virtually all states today, there are campaigns aimed at increasing civic education in local schools. In 2010, after an impassioned speech by Sandra Day O’Connor, Florida started a civic education program that has been highly successful. You cannot graduate from, I think, either middle school or high school in Florida unless you can pass that immigration test. It is a simple measure, but a very important one, in having institutionalized civics education in Florida.
There are other states, like Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington, and New York, that have campaigns going on to increase civic education in state school systems. Everybody across the United States should learn more about what those programs are in their individual states.
There are also national programs occurring. iCivics is leading one called “Educating for American Democracy.” It is a program looking at establishing a national model of civic education.
There are so many different ways to participate. I tell people it is not just simply politics. There are ways of participating in your community that involve service in so many different ways. You do not have to be a political figure. You just have to be a person who cares.
DR: My final question is this. Suppose somebody says, “I want to be Sonia Sotomayor when I grow up. I want to be a leader. I want to be a great justice.” What are the one or two attributes that you would recommend to young women and young men that they develop if they really want to become a leader as they get older?
SS: Passion. That is the first quality. To become a leader, you have to show people that you care deeply about things. People only follow those they think are passionate. So you have to possess passion and, second, commitment driven by dedication and hard work. You do not get anywhere unless you work hard.
I tell kids all the time, “Think of every sports athlete that you admire. They did not wake up a star. They had to work at it. Every basketball star you know has been on the court for hours, days, months, and years, practicing that throw shot.” You have to work hard to achieve anything in this life. You have to have perseverance and dedication and a sense of commitment to working hard, to doing things right.