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Sonia Sotomayor


American
June 25, 1954
Judge
monte pelmo dolomites alm nature
The task of a judge is not to make the law - it is to apply the law.


Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Make Law Judge
All judges have cases that touch our passions deeply, but we all struggle constantly with remaining impartial.
Sonia Sotomayor
Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Time See Each
I found in my experiences that it's not that men are consciously discriminating against promoting women, but I do believe as people we have self-images about what's good.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Good Women Men
I think that the day a justice forgets that each decision comes at a cost to someone, then I think you start losing your humanity.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: You Think I Think
We have to look and ensure that we're paying attention to what we're doing, so that we don't reflexively institute processes and procedures that exclude people without thought.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: People Doing Look
If you're poor, you don't often live near a good school. If it's a competitive public school program, our kids are not prepared to enter those programs.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Good You Our
Since I have difficulty defining merit and what merit alone means - and in any context, whether it's judicial or otherwise - I accept that different experiences in and of itself, bring merit to the system.
Sonia Sotomayor
What's quote-unquote a 'good' lawyer, doctor, or whatever the profession is. And if you're a male who grew up professionally in a male-dominated profession, then your image of what a good lawyer is a male image.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Good You Who
In examining witnesses, I learned to ask general questions so as to elicit details with powerful sensory associations: the colors, the sounds, the smells that lodge an image in the mind and put the listener in the burning house.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Put Mind House
You know, failure hurts. Any kind of failure stings. If you live in the sting, you will - undoubtedly - fail. My way of getting past the sting is to say no, I'm just not going to let this get me down.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Failure You Me
I have spent my years since Princeton, while at law school and in my various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of the worlds I inhabit. I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Up Always Am
If I write a book where all I've ever experienced is success, people won't take a positive lesson from it. In being candid, I have to own up to my own failures, both in my marriage and in my work environment.
Sonia Sotomayor
I listened very, very carefully to the world around me to pick up the signals of when trouble was coming. Not that I could stop it. But it made me observant. That was helpful when I became a lawyer, because I knew how to read people's signals.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: People Me Because
When you have strong views about how to approach thinking about the law, then that view is going to lead to certain results in certain situations. And so people seem to think this predictability is based on some kind of partisan political view. But it's not.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: You People About
I barely saw my mother, and the mom I saw was often angry and unhappy. The mother I grew up with is not the mother I know now. It's not the mother she became after my father died, and that's been the greatest prize of my life.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Mom Up Life
The schools that suffer are the schools in, in poor neighborhoods. They are the neighborhoods with the greatest need, with the parents struggling to work and to make ends meet. They don't have enough resources to give, they don't have enough resources to pay more, and these are the neighborhoods that go first.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Work More Make
My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Good Hope Know
When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Home You Really
I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.
Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Were Am I Am