My Beloved World (25 page)

YALE LAW SCHOOL WAS
and is uniquely small among the top law schools in the country. There were only about 180 in our class. The numbers reflect not only highly selective admissions but also a commitment to fostering a supportive environment on a human scale. Not surprisingly, I found myself surrounded by the most brilliant, dazzlingly articulate, and hard-charging people I’d ever met. Many were entering the field having already established stellar reputations doing something else. There were PhDs in philosophy, economics, math, and physics. We
had writers, a doctor, a film critic, an opera singer, not to mention several Rhodes scholars in our class. It would have been even more daunting if we could have known at the time that the class of 1979 would go on to extraordinary success even by the school’s extraordinary standards: so many members are now deans and professors at top law schools, federal and state judges, or otherwise in the highest echelons of government or practice. I’m told that this rarefied company made everyone feel as insecure as I did, but that would be difficult to verify.

To take a bit of the edge off this ultimate clash of academic all-stars, grading was elided into something resembling a pass-fail system. Students were not ranked. One friend believed there would have been a significant homicide rate otherwise. No one wanted to be seen trying too hard, and all affected a coolly casual demeanor. But behind closed doors they were working like maniacs, and I was no exception. I read the cases scrupulously and would never have dreamed of walking into class unprepared. But that wasn’t enough to banish the threat of being humiliated at any time. Instruction proceeded by a process of interrogation, an only somewhat less terrifying version of the Socratic method at Harvard that had recently been dramatized in
The Paper Chase
. If I faced no one as sadistic as John Houseman’s character, professors still sometimes relished eliciting an inadequate answer as an opportunity to dig deeper and lay fully bare the flawed understanding that had produced it. Even a correct answer could lead to further probing that might leave you looking for a hole to crawl into.

I could see there was a method to this torment. We were being conditioned to think on our feet and immunized against the emotional rough-and-tumble of an adversarial profession. Professors at Yale did not look down on us: they assumed that everyone there was smart and in many ways related to us as peers. But often I felt as if I were floundering. It wasn’t merely the intense circumstantial pressure. Listening to class discussions, I could follow the reasoning, but I couldn’t anticipate where it was headed. For all Princeton had taught me about academic argumentation, law school seemed to operate on a plane of its own. If history involved more than memorizing names and dates, the practice of law was even more removed from merely learning a body of rules and statutes, as I had naively assumed it would be. Instead, becoming
a lawyer required mastery of a new way of thinking, and not one that followed obviously from other disciplines. What’s more, there was often recourse to distinct and not necessarily concurrent frameworks of jurisprudence, theories of law that our professors had devoted whole careers to exploring and elaborating. In retrospect, it occasionally made for a rather chaotic and perhaps overly theoretical approach to the basic aim of preparing new lawyers for practice. But there is no doubt that the jurisprudential systems to which I was exposed would be put into service much later when I came to the bench.

What systems particularly? I know some readers will be inclined to sift this chapter for clues to my own jurisprudence. I regret to disappoint them, but that’s not the purpose of this book. Suffice it to say, during my years there, from 1976 to 1979, Yale was on the cusp of some radical changes in the way that law was taught and understood.

But let me not overstate the influence of those innovations, which seem in hindsight more dramatic than they did at the time and which sometimes were more methodological than theoretical (Guido Calabresi’s torts class, for instance, which I took in my first semester, incorporated quantitative methods from economics, an approach that appealed to me given the computer work I’d done at Princeton and that heralded further melding of law with the social sciences at Yale). For the most part, however, of necessity, we were learning the law as it had traditionally been taught. In constitutional law and other areas, the theories presented were primarily those enshrined in the particulars of Supreme Court cases, as articulated in the opinions, concurrences, and dissents of the justices. Many of my courses were taught by established giants in their field; I had Grant Gilmore for Contracts, Charles Black for Admiralty, Elias Clark for Trusts and Estates, Geoffrey Hazard for Procedure, Ralph Winter for Antitrust Law. They followed the time-honored approach to common-law development: analyzing particular cases to extract principles and then considering whether those principles applied in subsequent cases, and if not, what exceptions they created.

In fact, most of the theoretical ferment that would come to dominate the study of law, particularly constitutional law, with professors’ commentaries coming to overshadow the opinions of justices, was as yet on the horizon. I did take a course on Speech, Press, and the First Amendment
with Robert Bork, but arguments about judicial restraint, original intent, and strict construction had not yet entered our conversations as students, let alone the focus of our training. The Federalist Society, with its commitment to originalism, would not be founded until three years after I’d left Yale, and its liberal responders were still further in the offing. My own awareness of these debates would not gel until I’d become a judge, when, by happy coincidence, I joined three of my colleagues on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals—Guido Calabresi, Ralph Winter, and José Cabranes, former professors of mine at Yale. It was then I’d have the conversations I was not remotely equipped to have as a student.

IT MAY SEEM UNLIKELY
, but even among my ultra-high-wattage classmates, and with minimal time to spare for social life or extracurriculars, I did not feel isolated at Yale. Partly, this was because “1Ls” were divided into small groups for some classes. In this way, the intense pressure we all felt became a bonding experience, with competitive animus channeled outside the group while within it we made some friends for life.

There was also something of a sisterhood in my class. Although the law school had been admitting women since 1918, they were still a minority. In our class of 180, there were only 41 of us, and that was a significant increase over previous years. Naturally, we felt connected and especially supportive of one another. There was Martha Minow, now dean at Harvard; the future professors Susan Sturm and Ellen Wright Clayton; the journalist-lawyer Carol Green; and Susan Hoffman, now a leader in the California state bar. The obvious brilliance of these women often frightened me, but I realized quickly that it didn’t make them any less human or companionable. And once we became friends, I learned that some of them, in their own way, felt just as insecure at Yale as I did.

My very closest friends, however, were of a different stripe.

Felix Lopez, a Puerto Rican orphan from the tenements and projects of East Harlem, was a high school dropout who’d been clever enough to let himself get caught in a minor act of controlled arson so that he could enter the safe haven of a home for juvenile delinquents. From there, via Vietnam and the GI Bill, he would graduate at the top of his class at the
University of Michigan. Early struggles wouldn’t prevent Felix, a teddy bear with a huge heart, from committing himself to alleviating the suffering of others. If he hasn’t yet saved the world, he’s not done trying.

Born a member of the Mohawk nation, Drew Ryce, with his streety Spanish, could have passed for Latino, especially after he’d cut off his braids. He recounted tales of surviving a childhood on the streets of Chicago so close to hell that its fires burnished his accounts of that time with a sometimes unbelievable glow, or of how Yale had poached him from Harvard. He had a mind like an IBM mainframe, only much less predictable. He and Kevin would become very close, spending long hours talking music and old movies.

A Chicano from small-town New Mexico, Rudy Aragon spent six years in the air force as an intelligence officer, after which he had a very clear objective for his career in law: he was aiming for the top of a major law firm. George Keys, who had known Rudy since their U.S. Air Force Academy days, was similarly hell-bent on corporate success, determined to attain what had been denied his father as a black man living in the segregated southern town that was this nation’s capital.

These compadres, whose concern and intelligence I could always count on, were the four older brothers I’d never had. Each remained acutely aware of the parallel universe, the other America, from which he had been beamed into New Haven. Each was worldly-wise beyond any experience of mine. They all called me “kid.” And that’s how I felt around them. When Kevin and I played host to them, the menu consisted of stretchable specialties I had recently mastered—soups, stews, spaghetti. But when it was Felix’s turn, he pulled out the stops with exotic offerings he’d picked up during his tour in Vietnam—summer rolls with peanut sauce, and a lemongrass-caramel chicken dish—and finished with a French apple galette. These guys even knew how to choose a bottle of wine and couldn’t have been nicer the one time I got drunk trying to keep up with them.

They became the center of my extracurricular life, what time for it we could spare. With Rudy, I co-chaired LANA, Yale’s Latino, Asian, and Native American student association. The focus was on recruitment and other issues like those I’d dealt with at Princeton. It was sometimes surprising how the support of their own kind, which had
been so essential to my survival at Princeton and which in a smaller way I’d re-created among my law school friends, was not such a priority among some of the minority students at Yale. Here I found more Latinos and members of other groups who seemed determined to assimilate as quickly and thoroughly as possible, bearing any attendant challenges and psychic costs in private. I could understand the impulse, but it was never a choice I could have made myself.

Drew got me into more mainstream activity at the Graduate and Professional Student Center, better known as the GPSC—or “Gypsy.” Essentially, it was a bar for grad students—the cheapest drinks in New Haven—and as vice president of operations, he hired me to work the door, taking tickets and checking IDs. I would have preferred to work behind the bar, which paid better, but I was a more than adequate bouncer. Nobody could talk their way past me, and I ejected many a townie trying to climb in through the window to avoid the cover charge. My instincts only failed me once: A group of girls wanted to have a look around inside before paying the cover, to see if they really wanted to stay. Not having been born yesterday, I told them nice try and was about to send them on their way, when Drew appeared. Getting worked up when he caught wind of the situation, he wound up apologizing to the ladies and insisting I let them in for free. The bar, he told me, was full of desperate guys with no one to dance with—a very bad situation for liquor sales.

“It’s not right, Drew, the guys are paying, why should the women get in free? Can’t you see that’s sex discrimination?”

“Not everything is a civil rights case, Sonia!” he yelled. “I’ve got a band to pay and nobody’s drinking.” We argued some more, until finally he solved the problem by promoting me to bartender and putting someone else on the door.

With such a colorful crew, alliances could shift and tensions flare from time to time, but the gravitational pull of adoptive family always held. I invited my compadres to Co-op City to meet my mother and then for many a holiday dinner. They felt comfortable enough to critique Mami’s taste in art. The Three Graces that hung in the living room, a metal bas-relief on velvet, they dubbed “a tit and three asses.” But behind their bravado I could sense that they were slightly in awe of my
mother’s steadiness and her unassuming concern for so many people around her; it was something they in their wanderings had missed out on and would sometimes struggle to find.

IT WAS
at Yale that I met the first person I can describe as a true mentor. I had long known the good of seeking out the guidance of teachers, from Miss Katz to Nancy Weiss and Peter Winn at Princeton. And I had an even older understanding of how much friends and classmates could teach me. But I had not yet discovered the benefit of sustained dialogue with someone who epitomized the kind of achievement I aspired to, and much beyond that. It was not the comfort of handholding; rather, it was a style of learning by means of engaging a living example. Some of us are natural autodidacts; others learn best by visual representation; others still by auditory cues. For me the most agreeable and effective instruction has come from observing the nuances and complexity of live action, the complete package of knowledge, experience, and judgment that is another human being. Whenever I make a new friend, my mind goes naturally to the question, what can I learn from this person? There are very few people in the world whom you can’t learn something from, but even rarer are those souls who can reveal whole worlds to you if you observe them carefully.

I first met José Cabranes through a Princeton friend who’d worked with me in Acción Puertorriqueña. Charlie Hey-Maestre had been a year behind me, and when I was in my first year at Yale, he was writing his senior thesis, which dealt with issues around U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans. He had come to Yale to consult José Cabranes, who was an expert on the topic. I had offered Charlie our couch for the night, and we stayed up late talking. “So who is this Cabranes guy?” I asked. Charlie explained: José Cabranes had served as special counsel to the governor of Puerto Rico and head of the commonwealth’s Washington office, and he was now Yale’s general counsel, the first ever named to that position. Earlier, he had been a founder of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and a professor at Rutgers. He was a trailblazer and a hero to many for his work promoting civil rights for Hispanics.