february1–14, 2021 | newyork 33Murray reminded her that during Sotomayor’s nomination
hearings, she painted her nails inoffensively neutral colors until
her swearing in.
“I walked up to the president when he was celebrating my con-
firmation, and I said, ‘Do you notice anything different?’ ” Barack
Obama did not. Sotomayor held both hands up to her face and
grinned. “ ‘They’re red.’”
Later on, Sotomayor did something I’ve never seen any other
justice do, wading into the audience to command the micro-
phone and take questions, punctuating answers with hugs and
offering to take photos before the students even had to ask. “You
were like Oprah,” said Murray, amused.
This kind of ease in public didn’t always come naturally to Soto-
mayor. In her memoir, My Beloved World, far more intimate and
lyrical than your usual Court wonkery and written with an Iranian
American poet named Zara Houshmand, Sotomayor
describes her childhood in the Bronxdale Houses as “a
state of constant tension punctuated by explosive discord,
all of it caused by my father’s alcoholism and my mother’s
response to it, whether family fight or emotional flight.”
At 7 years old, Sonia fainted in church. She was rushed to
the doctor’s office, where she was so terrified of the needle
during the blood draw that she bolted, hiding under a
parked car in a ball, as small as she could make herself.
She was eventually diagnosed with diabetes. “But the dis-
ease also inspired in me a kind of precocious self-reliance
that is not uncommon in children who feel the adults
around them to be unreliable,” she wrote. Eventually, she
learned to wield the needle herself.
Sotomayor’s nickname in her family was Ají (“hot
pepper”). “Perhaps my eventual enjoyment of being a liti-
gator owes something to the license it gave me to disagree
more openly with people,” she wrote. These are, of course,
traits expected of the Manhattan prosecutor and law-firm
partner Sotomayor was before she was a judge, though
you will be shocked to learn they redounded differently
for a young Latina from the Bronx, sterling Princeton and
Yale Law credentials notwithstanding. When David
Souter retired in 2009 and word spread that Obama was
considering Second Circuit judge Sotomayor, certain
legal elites scrambled to dissuade him.
In public, there was Rosen’s piece. In private, there
was the letter from Harvard professor Laurence Tribe
that was later leaked to and published by Ed Whelan,
the conservative lawyer who more recently became
notorious for using Zillow to craft an improbable sex-
ual-assault defense of Kavanaugh. Tribe was pushing
for the appointment of Kagan, his sometime Harvard
dean, and claimed Sotomayor was “not nearly as smart
as she seems to think she is.” Tribe recanted soon after.
“Literally everything Justice Sotomayor has said, writ-
ten, and done as a Member of the Supreme Court since
her confirmation in 2009 has confirmed my confession
of error and President Obama’s wisdom in overcoming
the doubts I’d expressed,” he told me in an email. “Her
judicial opinions, including particularly her impas-
sioned and logically rigorous and legally incisive dis-
sents, have greatly enriched the jurisprudence fromwhicha
more enlightened and humane Court will be able todrawwhen
the pendulum of judicial appointments swings backfromthe
extreme rightward tilt of the current era.”
Some of the criticisms came by way of the speakerstellingon
themselves. “If you had come up with a list of peopleinourclass
that would be named to the Supreme Court,” one YaleLawclass-
mate told the Yale Daily News, “she would not have beenonit.” OnTV and in print, the conversation became about box-checking.
(“He’s supposed to pick a Latina,” Chris Matthews mused. “Would
he do that just because that’s sort of the unfilled void in his patron-
age plan so far?” Richard Cohen wrote, “The ceiling is further low-
ered by the need to season the court with diversity, a wonderful idea
as long as brilliance is not compromised.” One Mark Halperin head-
line read: “White Men Need Not Apply.”)
Her clerks are still, understandably, fuming. “These are all
extremely tired racist and sexist tropes,” says one. “There’s plenty of
white men appellate judges who, unlike her, say crazy shit, and no
one says they’re bullies. They’re just ‘sharp-elbowed and intellec-
tual.’ ” Another says, “I found it bizarre and frustrating that there
was so much focus on her identity,” even though Sotomayor had
excelled at elite institutions and held practically every kind of legal
and judicial job. “There was no one more qualified.”Butheridentity wassomethingSotomayorherself embraced,
evenwhenit couldcost her. As anappeals-court judge in 2001,
shegavea speechthat wouldlaterdominateherconfirmation
hearings.“Americahasa deeplyconfusedimage ofitself that is in
perpetualtension,” shearguedthere.“Wearea nation that takes
prideinourethnicdiversity, recognizingitsimportance in shap-
ingoursocietyandinaddingrichnesstoitsexistence. Yet we
simultaneouslyinsist that wecanandmust function and live inGinsburgandSotomayor, alongsideRobertsandKennedy,
ata jointsessionofCongressinSeptember2015.Fiveyearslater, Sotomayor
wouldattendthelatejustice’s privatememorialservice.PHOTOGRAPHS: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES (CONGRESS); ANDREW HARNIK-POOL/GETTY IMAGES (CEREMONY)