Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor (7 page)

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 they described as a formula for failure.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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 curiosity.

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.
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Sotomayor, who was twenty-four at the time, wrote 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.” When the law firm partner asked, “Do you consider yourself culturally deprived?” she said she wanted to respond, with sarcastic reference to the musical
West Side Story
, “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 know where to begin answering that one. And an awkward silence descended upon us.”
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Later that night Sotomayor told friends what had happened. Minority classmates believed she should file a complaint. José Cabranes advised against it. He did not think the partner’s offense was that serious, and he also worried that going public would backfire on her. Acting on her own instincts, Sotomayor decided to let the partner know how she felt during the formal interview the next day. She then filed a complaint with the university, challenging Shaw, Pittman’s right to recruit on campus. Yale asked a student-faculty tribunal to look into the matter.

The panel determined that the partner had violated the school’s antidiscrimination rules and asked the Shaw, Pittman firm to apologize. The firm’s first letter was so weak the school asked for another.
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In the second letter, the firm’s senior partner wrote that the partner’s remarks were “insensitive and regrettable.” Sotomayor recalled that she was most outraged that he would have presumed that she barely got by at Princeton, when she had won its prestigious Pyne Prize and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

The recruiting dinner incident made news, including in
The Washington Post
. Such behavior was not unusual toward minorities and women in those days. Sotomayor’s classmates had heard such insults and denigrating remarks. “‘You’re only here because of affirmative action,’” said Carmen Shepard, a Puerto Rican friend of Sotomayor’s at Yale. “People looked at you as if you were not deserving. It was pervasive. It was a very difficult and a very painful issue to deal with … You get angry. But you don’t live angry.” Shepard and other classmates said they were not sure they would have been brave enough to challenge a law firm recruiter the way Sotomayor had. “To stop it in its tracks and say that’s wrong,” Shepard said, “that took courage.”
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It was a daring move, particularly because of what had happened to Sotomayor a few months earlier while she was a summer associate at the large Manhattan law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Sotomayor failed to do well enough to receive an offer to return after graduation, as was the usual practice, particularly for Yale students.

Paul, Weiss had a sterling reputation and counted among its alumni Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg. In the 1970s and ’80s, a summer associate job at a large law firm like Paul, Weiss was essentially a guarantee of future employment. Firms rarely refused to invite their summer hires back as full associates, but Sotomayor received no such invitation.