Steve Petteway
Sonia Sotomayor grew up in a housing project in New York City. The daughter of native Puerto Ricans, her father died when she was just 9 years old. He never learned English. Her mother, an orphan, raised Sotomayor and her brother in the Bronx, in a neighborhood plagued by poverty and violence. Nevertheless, Sotomayor was always at the top of her class. In 2009, she became the first Latina and the third woman to be confirmed as an associate justice to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Margaret Raymond, dean of UW-Madison Law School, says you’d be hard pressed to find a more inspirational figure than Sotomayor.
“She doesn’t come from a vast amount of privilege but she sits everyday in the highest court in the land,” Raymond says. “Understanding the people whose matters come before you is a very interesting piece of what it means to be a judge.”
Students will have their chance to hear from Sotomayor on Sept. 8 as part of the law school’s Robert W. Kastenmeier Lecture series at Shannon Hall. Tickets to the free lecture are already sold out. The first Kastenmeier lecture, in 1992, featured then Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Justice Antonin Scalia was the last Supreme Court member to visit UW in 2001.
“We put out an inquiry to Justice Sotomayor through one of our colleagues who’s [her] former clerk. She was quite amenable, quite interested in coming out,” says Peter Carstensen, professor of law emeritus and a member of the Kastenmeier Lecture planning committee.
The format of the event is being billed as a discussion with Sotomayor, lead by two of her former clerks Lindsey Powell and Rob Yablon, a faculty member at UW Law School. The justice’s visit to Madison comes during a fascinating time in the court’s history. Since the death of Scalia in March, U.S. Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has refused to hold a confirmation for President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland. This has left the court evenly divided, four to four, between the justices’ informal (and sometimes unpredictable) political factions.
Raymond, who was once a clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, is unsure whether Sotomayor will address the current limbo the court now finds itself in.
“An evenly divided court — for an extended period of time — is an interesting phenomenon. But it’s also an internal phenomenon,” says Raymond. “Members of the court are often very private about talking about happens behind closed doors ‘in the congress,’ which is what they call it when the justices sit down together to decide things.”
Carstensen says Sotomayor’s rise to the Supreme Court will be just interesting as her insight into the court’s future.
“This is particularly exciting opportunity for not only our law students but everyone, to understand that if you really work hard at your education, you can accomplish one heckuva a lot,” he says. “This is why I’m just delighted that Justice Sotomayor is coming.”
