Public Employee Press

Book review
First Latina on U.S. Supreme Court shares her "beloved world"

In her new best-selling memoir, "My Beloved World," Sonia Sotomayor - our first Latina and third woman Supreme Court justice - reminisces about growing up in a public housing project, her college days and her first jobs.

With both parents working (her mother as a nurse) and then her father dying at an early age, Sonia became self-reliant. She loved books, especially mysteries such as the Nancy Drew series, which inspired her to become a lawyer. Growing up she was sensitive to racial and sexual discrimination and the plight of the poor. She wrote that "when someone's dignity shatters, it leaves a hole that a feeling heart naturally wants to fill."

While she typically reacted to injustice on an individual basis, she also admired the poor people's campaign in the Bronx led by Father Louis Gigante; however, then and later in life she avoided joining in mass movements. She developed an ability to understand both sides of an argument and honed it in a high school debating class. Sotomayor was brilliant and worked tirelessly to achieve her new goal of becoming a judge. She excelled at Princeton University and Yale Law School and joined student organizations such as Accion Puertoriqueno to expand opportunities for students of color.

She believed in appealing to people's better nature, finding good faith on both sides and building bridges. But when a law firm recruiter insulted her for benefiting from affirmation action, she organized a successful campaign to have the firm barred from campus recruiting and they apologized.

She worked as a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney and for a corporate law firm. Always expanding her world while staying close to her roots, Sotomayor capped the phase of her life covered in the memoir with her appointment as a federal judge before the age of forty. I found her story inspiring but politically frustrating. "An honest broker in the art of compromise between opposing interests is always my first response to political divisions," she writes, leaving us guessing - as is appropriate for a Supreme Court justice - at how her philosophy will play out on the court.

—Ken Nash
Librarian, DC 37 Education Fund