After years on the Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor still feels like an outsider.

[pnwmom]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/09/sonia_sotomayor_conversation_at_notre_dame_first_latina_doesn_t_feel_like.html

Sotomayor can be at her most poignant when she is trying to explain what it is that makes her feel so different from her colleagues, whom she respects and admires. Her dissenting opinion in a Michigan affirmative action case from last year was the most striking example of an effort to show us that her experiences make her fundamentally unlike many Americans who have occupied the federal bench. Her take on it this week at Notre Dame was a variation on that theme. “I'm very different from my colleagues,” she explained, adding that she’s generally more public and outspoken than her colleagues at the court.

“I am different and yet I’m not because we’re all engaged in the same enterprise. We’re all trying to come to the right decisions together, and we’re all part of that conversation,” she said. “To that extent, I belong. But will I ever quite feel that I have their same background, their same understanding of the world that I operate on? Not really.”

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In her autobiography, Sotomayor wrote about how she learned at Princeton to “build bridges instead of walls,” and it’s a mistake to hear in her dogged (and often relentless) questioning at oral arguments someone who merely wants to hear her own voice. No, Sotomayor feels that she is, and probably always will be, on the outside of virtually every lofty professional setting in which she finds herself and she thinks talking and listening are the best mechanisms she can deploy to bridge those gulfs. As she told the students at Notre Dame this week, “Those small slights, those senses of not belonging, can make you not belong if you let them. … You can belong and make friends in almost any place or setting you’re in, but sometimes you have to make the effort to bridge that gap.”

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