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: Law Blog - WSJ.com

A Portrait of the Judge as a Young Lawyer

By Ashby Jones

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In our digging around today on Judge Sotomayor, we stumbled across two fascinating articles from way back when, one from the NYT, the other from the WaPo. Unfortunately, we don’t have links to the pieces, but we’ll excerpt them, in pertinent part, as you lawyers are wont to say.

November 1983: The NYT piece takes us all the way back to November of 1983. At the time, Sotomayor was 29 and in the fifth year of her stint as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. The NYT decided to run a lengthy piece on the lives, thoughts and opinions of young prosecutors in New York. Sonia Sotomayor — amusingly referred to repeatedly as “Miss Sotomayor” throughout the piece and described as smoking “cigarettes incessantly” — was featured prominently.

On becoming a prosecutor after leaving Yale Law: ”There was a tremendous amount of pressure from my community, from the third-world community, at Yale . . . . They could not understand why I was taking this job. I’m not sure I’ve ever resolved that problem.”

On her initial struggles at the DA’s office, and why it eventually got easier: ”I had more problems during my first year in the office with the low-grade crimes - the shoplifting, the prostitution, the minor assault cases. In large measure, in those cases you were dealing with socioeconomic crimes, crimes that could be the product of the environment and of poverty.

Once I started doing felonies, it became less hard. No matter how liberal I am, I’m still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous.”

On idealism and the criminal-justice system: ”The one thing I have found . . . . is that if you come into the criminal-justice system on a prosecutorial or defense level thinking that you can change the ills of society, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. This is not where those kinds of changes have to be made.”

On the mixed-emotions of a conviction: ”It pains me . . . when I meet particularly bright defendants - and I’ve met quite a few of them - people who, if they had had the right guidance, the right education, the right breaks, could have been contributing members of our society. When they get convicted, there’s a satisfaction, because they’re doing things that are dangerous. But there are also nights when I sit back and say, ‘My God, what a waste!’ ”

December 1978: “Law Firm Apologizes to Yale Student,” reads the headline from a Washington Post story from over 30 years ago.

According to the article: Sonia Sotomayor, at the time a Yale Law student, interviewed in October 1978 at the D.C. law firm formerly known as Shaw Pittman Potts & Trowbridge.

During a recruiting dinner, Sotomayor said she was asked by a partner a handful of questions about her race, including: ‘Do law firms do a disservice by hiring minority students who the firms know do not have the necessary credentials and will then fire in three to four years?,” and “Would I have been admitted to the law school if I were not a Puerto Rican?”

The next day, Sotomayor reportedly challenged the lawyer who’d asked the questions during her official interview. In response, the lawyer said said he didn’t mean any harm and invited her for further interviews in Washington. She refused and instead filed a formal complaint against Shaw Pittman with Yale.

A student-faculty tribunal at Yale found the questions violated Yale rules against discrimination and asked Shaw Pittman for an apology, which the firm’s managing partner at the time, Ramsay Potts, gave, calling the questions “insensitive and regrettable”, and acknowledging “they may have had a chilling effect on the firm’s recruitment of minorities and other students.”

The story ended in a way we found amusingly quaint:

The incident rocked the 50-lawyer firm, which has a large number of Yale graduates among its partners and associates. Although not one of the best-known Washington firms, Shaw Pittman is highly respected here and does a usual Washington administrative law practice.