Still, she said the drive to compromise is not without drawbacks. She also said the court is trying to reach consensus, noting there have been relatively few split 4-4 decisions from the eight-judge court. There is a rhythm to the question-asking,” she said. “There is an appreciable difference between eight and nine. Sotomayor posited that there are likely more arguments now where the parties are left with additional time at the end of their presentations. “And I would jump and start the ball rolling,” she said. “What began to happen is that lawyers would get out there, and they’d be talking, and they’d get anxious.” With Scalia around, he was normally the first justice to jump in and ask questions, she said. “I was filling the dead space during the arguments,” Sotomayor said. Sotomayor said that since Justice Antonin Scalia passed away last year, she’s been more likely to jump in with the first question. “But I give myself credit for perhaps having a vision of how the law affects people and letting that guide me to what I think are the right answers in the law.” 3. “I’m not the smartest person in that Supreme Court,” Sotomayor said. She said the possibility of failure resulted in her working 12 to 14 hours per day, seven days a week for her first two years on the bench, something she said she repeated when elevated to higher courts. “I was convinced I was going to fail,’ she said. She called becoming a district court judge earlier in her career “the most terrifying event of my life.” Sotomayor, however, quickly changed the tone of the conversation by pointing out that the articles about her intellect and statements by a Yale law professor who said that she’d never write an important Supreme Court opinion caused her to question her abilities. “Alternative facts,” chimed Sotomayor, eliciting a roar from the crowd. “Fake news,” said Murray, drawing laughs. Sotomayor noted that when she was going through the nomination process there were a number of newspaper articles claiming that she lacked the intellectual bona fides for the gig. She’s Adopted Some of the Current Washington Parlance “What I’m looking for are people who have experienced life in some form of richness.” “They have to be committed to making a contribution to the world in some way,” she said. “I’m not searching for people that are identical to me,” Sotomayor said. Murray said she told the judge stories she hadn’t even shared with her colleagues at law school and spent the train ride back to school thinking she had blown the interview. Where Murray had prepared to wow Sotomayor with smart talk about the law, the judge spent the majority of her time asking Murray about herself and her experience being raised by a single mother. Murray recounted her experience interviewing for a clerkship with Sotomayor in 2000 when the justice was still a judge on the U.S. The following are a handful of highlights of her appearance. Between sit-downs with Murray, however, Sotomayor wandered through the aisles shaking hands and granting multiple hug requests from crowd members while answering pre-screened questions from law students. Interim UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Melissa Murray opened and closed the wide-ranging discussion by asking Sotomayor questions on stage. Sotomayor, the most frequent public speaker among the justices, was greeted as something of a judicial rock star on the left-leaning college campus where free tickets for the event were reportedly snapped up within five minutes after they were made available. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor held court on Thursday in front of an enthusiastic, capacity crowd at the 2,600-seat Zellerbach Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus. A conversation with Sonia Sotomayor at University of California Berkeley (Jason Doiy / ALM)īERKELEY - U.S.
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