Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Conversation at Yale | America's Written Constitution

Justice Sonia Sotomayor got a C on her first college paper and spent a summer working through grammar books from first grade to twelfth. She tells that story and many others in this conversation at Yale's Woolsey Hall. Yale Law School professor Judith Resnik leads the discussion, opening with the first opinion Sotomayor wrote for the Court, in a case Resnik argued, and with its quiet significance: the phrase "undocumented immigrant" entering the United States Reports, later cited by the Supreme Court of California. The conversation then follows the arc of Sotomayor's memoir, My Beloved World. She describes an admissions interview at Radcliffe that she fled, a recruiting visit to Yale that felt too radical for a Catholic girl from the Bronx, and choosing Princeton because a friend from her high school met her at the bus station. She talks about the professor who circled every adjective in her paper and told her to stop thinking in Spanish, about competing against herself rather than her classmates, about leaning over to ask Justice Stevens what a colleague was really arguing, and about what affirmative action gave her, which she describes as the chance to know a race was being run at all. The session closes on how the book was written, into a Dictaphone across three summers. Chapters: 00:00 Welcome and introductions 08:14 Returning to a very different New Haven 11:54 How she came to apply to the Ivy League 13:58 The interview she fled 16:31 Choosing between Princeton and Yale 21:12 Finding a community, and venturing out of it 31:37 Learning to write, one paper at a time 39:32 On admitting what you do not know 42:04 Joining a conversation already in progress 44:39 What affirmative action opened 50:22 Writing My Beloved World Learning objectives: After watching, you'll be able to: - Describe the path Sotomayor took from the Bronx to the Supreme Court - Explain her distinction between ignorance and stupidity as a learning strategy - Summarize her account of how elite admissions worked before the civil rights era - Identify what she means by competing against yourself rather than your peers - Interpret a justice's first opinion as a site of deliberate word choice 📺 Watch the full playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCq6-l8oFuvk 🎓 Enroll on Coursera for assessments and a certificate: https://www.coursera.org/learn/written-constitution 🌐 Explore more learning opportunities on Yale Online: https://online.yale.edu/courses/americas-written-constitution