BALTIMORE, Maryland April 8, 2014 - I read the interview thinking that, like many American Public Figures, once she was outside the country she would let her guard down and give a couple of humdinger quotes. I was wrong. The Supreme Court Justice who was interviewed by Der Spiegel, Sonia Sotomayor, comes across as a committed American Justice who defended American traditions far more than she complained about them.
True, she stayed within the topic of her new book and gave frank descriptions of her efforts to break gender stereotypes as she moved up the ladder of accomplishments. But when Der Spiegel asked for her feelings on a big issue splitting the German Public, she gave a decidedly mainstream answer. The issue is a proposed German Law which mandates that women make up a certain percentage of management positions in private companies. The Honorable Supreme Court Justice said, "In the United States, certain segments of society played with quotas for a number of years. What ended up happening is that the larger population got angry. And the Supreme Court ultimately said that quotas were not acceptable under the US Constitution. I think that some of it is driven by the American concept that success should always be based on merit."
Just from my own personal viewpoint, what a great answer! She admitted as an afterthought that merit doesn't end up being the deciding factor in many decisions, private and public. "The problem with that concept," she said, "I think, as most people know, is that success is not always about merit." But life isn't perfect. The law can't deal with every minute variable. That's what this person thinks, anyway.
I think a lot of people will love her recollections of her time in a Princeton Class devoted to Roman Law. The professor, whom she neither named nor criticized, other than her recollection of the good teacher's method of dealing with her presence in the class. "I was the only woman in a Roman law class. And the professor was a more senior professor. He must have been teaching the course for 20 or 30 years, and he taught the course (from) notes that he must have had for years. As he went through his lecture, he would reach a point where he would suddenly stop, look at me, and then skip the joke he was about to tell, which was clearly, he recognized, a sexist joke. I will never forget that. There were still all-male clubs at Princeton, and there were clearly men who preferred to belong to those all-male clubs rather than to the co-ed clubs. And there were professors who had taught all males, like this one, who were just more comfortable with teaching men. But as with the beginning of any social experiment, there were people who were trying very hard to make it work, who supported me."
The entire interview is here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-supreme-court-justice-sonia-sotomayor-a-961986.html
The book, which is being released now in German, is already available in paperback here. Amazon has it. It's title, "My Beloved World."
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