08/11/2014
Biskupic (American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia), who has covered the Supreme Court as a lawyer and journalist since 1989, turns her attention to the 111th Justice of the Supreme Court, the court’s first Hispanic and third woman. The book briefly traces Sotomayor’s Bronx childhood, Princeton undergraduate and Yale legal education, and first professional experiences. It then recounts in detail a “story of fortuitous timing and alignment with national events”: Sotomayor’s rise from associate judge, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, as a George H.W. Bush appointment; to her appointment by President Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit; and finally to her appointment to the Supreme Court by Obama. Not a formal biography, Biskupic’s book is a fascinating account of the political machinations involved in achieving a Supreme Court judgeship and of Sotomayor’s juridical decisions and actions since her appointment. Biskupic draws extensively from Sotomayor’s memoir, My Beloved World, and from official transcripts and media coverage. Her skill as a journalist enlivens these sources with vivid anecdotal detail, which makes for a guide through a convoluted process that will be informative for adults as well as any young readers who might hope to be a Supreme Court justice one day. Agent: Gail Ross, Ross Yoon Literary Agency. (Oct.)
Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor and the Politics of Justice
Narrated by Carrington MacDuffie
Joan BiskupicUnabridged — 8 hours, 19 minutes
Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor and the Politics of Justice
Narrated by Carrington MacDuffie
Joan BiskupicUnabridged — 8 hours, 19 minutes
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Overview
As a Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor has shared her personal story to an unprecedented degree. And that story-of a Latina who emerged from tough times in the projects not only to prevail but also to rise to the top-has even become fabric for some of her most passionate comments on matters before the Court. But there is yet more to know about the rise of Sotomayor. Breaking In offers the larger, untold story of the woman who has been called "the people's justice."
Editorial Reviews
A veteran Supreme Court reporter charts Sotomayor's evolution from a poor Puerto Rican girl living in the Bronx to the first Latina Justice on the Supreme Court. Sotomayor's sense of ethnic identity, Biskupic argues, may be as important a legacy as the Justice's legal contributions.” —Time
“Ms. Biskupic sets out to chronicle Justice Sotomayor's career and, in a parallel narrative, to trace the growing influence of the Hispanic population in the United States. ... Ms. Biskupic succeeds at both her tasks. ... Ms. Biskupic is at her journalistic best when she describes this federal judicial-nomination process, one that former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh once described as possessing the 'intricacies of chess and audacity of old-fashioned hardball.'” —Wall Street Journal
“[Biskupic] begins with ... Sotomayor's salsa dance at an end-of-term party for the court's justices and staff. ... [T]he vignette introduces the book's theme: that Sotomayor 'spent a lifetime challenging boundaries and disrupting the norm' and that, because she 'was not one to wait her turn,' she was able to exploit 'the cultural and political shifts that merged with [her] life and led to her appointment. ... In the end, Sotomayor does stand out, both as a courageous justice, as able as any of those who joined the court before her, and as an inspiring public figure. ... As Biskupic recognizes, [her public] message is likely to prove as powerful a measure of Sotomayor's impact on our national future as will her contributions to the work of the Supreme Court.” —Washington Post
“[Breaking In is] an examination of what it means to become a celebrity; a deeply reported study of how to concoct a strategy maximizing the chance of a presidential appointment to the Supreme Court; and a journalistic analysis of Sotomayor's court performance so far. ... Biskupic clearly and compellingly recounts how Sotomayor plotted her rise to the pinnacle of the judicial branch of government. ... Most important for the future of the USA, Biskupic explains why Sotomayor is sui generis on a court of nine justices, how she cares more about interpreting the Constitution and court precedent according to what's best for society rather than becoming a coalition builder.” —Seattle Times
“The book's strong suit is a wealth of detail about the race between Republicans and Democrats for the prize of appointing the first Hispanic justice. It is a primer for anyone with large ambitions, as well as a cautionary tale, since the message conveyed is that skillful manipulation of identity politics may carry the day over more substantial achievement. This is, of course, an old story for both parties, which have at times filled regional, religious, racial, and gender slots with candidates who eclipsed other, arguably better qualified, aspirant. Biskupic's book is well balanced, setting forth an array of views on Justice Sotomayor. ... The book opens with an arresting account of Sotomayor in a bold charm offensive at the 2010 Supreme Court end-of-term party. The story has to be read in full to be believed....” —National Review
“One U.S. Supreme Court justice's passionate behind-the-scenes fight to allow race to be considered in college admissions rescued the University of Texas from a historic legal defeat in 2013, according to a book released Tuesday. Offering a rare look into the secret deliberations of the nation's highest court, author Joan Biskupic's biography of Justice Sonia Sotomayor details for the first time how the court's first Hispanic member helped turn an initial 5-3 defeat for UT into a 7-1 decision.” —Austin American Statesmen
“A fascinating account of the political machinations involved in achieving a Supreme Court judgeship and of Sotomayor's juridical decisions and actions since her appointment… [Biskupic's] skill as a journalist enlivens [her] sources with vivid anecdotal detail” —Publishers Weekly
“Biskupic offers a compelling look at a justice who continues to face challenges to her right to sit on the bench.” —Booklist
“Biskupic combines scholarly rigor with a bit of human admiration in this cleareyed account of how someone advances a judicial career in 21st-century America… A balanced but also admiring portrait of a Latina, a jurist and a trailblazer.” —Kirkus
“This is a remarkable book about an extraordinary woman in very challenging times. Sonia Sotomayor's memoir is not complete without Breaking In. Joan Biskupic has done a wonderful and insightful job writing about the most influential Latina ever. She puts together three incredibly complex elements: Sotomayor's life of struggle, the rise of the Latino community, and the intricacies of the Supreme Court. The result is superb. Sotomayor's mission—that a single person can make a difference in the cause of justice—is transforming our country. You have to read it to know us.” —Jorge Ramos, anchor, Univision/Fusion
“If you think books about Supreme Court justices are only for lawyers, think again. Joan Biskupic has written a fascinating story, at once shrewd and sympathetic, about overcoming the fear of failure. Biskupic takes you into the head and the heart of the most interesting Supreme Court justice since . . . well there's never been a justice like Sotomayor.” —Evan Thomas, author of Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World
“It's hard to write a fair-minded biography of such a polarizing figure, but that's what Joan Biskupic has done with American Original . . . Impressively balanced and well reported.” —Jeffrey Rosen, The New York Times Book Review on American Original
“American Original is full of strong reporting. It is scrupulously even-handed, which may irritate partisans on both sides of the Scalia divide—there are few fence-straddlers when it comes to him . . . Biskupic's larger accomplishment is to present the recent evolution of the Supreme Court through the prism of its most colorful member.” —Jim Newton, Los Angeles Times on American Original
“A timely and important book . . . Illuminating.” —Anthony Lewis, The New York Review of Books on Sandra Day O'Connor
“Superbly thorough and perceptive.” —David J. Garrow, The New Republic on Sandra Day O'Connor
"A balanced but also admiring portrait of a Latina, a jurist and a trailblazer." —Kirkus
If you think books about Supreme Court justices are only for lawyers, think again. Joan Biskupic has written a fascinating story, at once shrewd and sympathetic, about overcoming the fear of failure. Biskupic takes you into the head and the heart of the most interesting Supreme Court justice since . . . well there's never been a justice like Sotomayor.
A timely and important book . . . Illuminating.
It's hard to write a fair-minded biography of such a polarizing figure, but that's what Joan Biskupic has done with American Original . . . Impressively balanced and well reported.
This detailed account of Sonia Sotomayor’s journey to the highest judicial appointment in the land is judiciously narrated in a style that also mirrors the candor of this hardworking Puerto Rican judge from the Bronx. Narrator Carrington MacDuffie employs assertive fervor in her tone, especially when describing Sotomayor’s personality. She’s the life of the party in one instance, angered by those who question her intelligence and abilities in another, and outspoken about being a product of affirmative action in yet another. Sounding strong, fluid, and direct, MacDuffie delivers the ebb and flow of the experiences that brought Sotomayor to the top of her profession. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
2014-07-06
A former Supreme Court correspondent for the Washington Post and current legal affairs editor for Reuters charts the spectacular career of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor—from the Bronx to the nation's highest court. Biskupic—who has written biographies of justices Scalia and O'Connor—combines scholarly rigor with a bit of human admiration in this cleareyed account of how someone advances a judicial career in 21st-century America. She periodically reminds us that Sotomayor came from a rough background, that she graduated summa cum laude from Princeton (after a slow start, she realized how behind she was) and that she excelled at Yale Law School. But the author also comments continually on Sotomayor's networking—the vast array of supporters whom she has summoned at various stages of her career to propel her advancement, perhaps most successfully when newly elected President Barack Obama was making his first appointment to the Supreme Court (David Souter was retiring). To add a bit of a sharp edge, Biskupic quotes the opponents of Sotomayor, including Harvard Law School's Laurence Tribe; twice, the author quotes Tribe's letter to Obama declaring that Sotomayor is "not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is." Biskupic also highlights Sotomayor's vivacious personality—everything from her nail polish to her love life to her disconcerting ways in the court. The author focuses on some of Sotomayor's cases (and comments) at various stages, including her controversial "wise Latina" remark and her impassioned defenses of affirmative action, a policy she often credits for her own successful career. We also learn about her work habits (assiduous) and her diabetes (under control). Most of all, however, we see in sharp relief the principal role that politics plays in court appointments. A balanced but also admiring portrait of a Latina, a jurist and a trailblazer.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170550852 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 12/16/2014 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Soto
By Joan Biskupic
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 Joan BiskupicAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-53566-7
ONE
Life of the Party
This party celebrating the end of the Supreme Court’s annual term is an exclusive affair that bears all the trappings of a staid, cultured institution and its privileged occupants. Festivities are staged in two majestic rooms that face each other across a red-carpeted hallway. Oil portraits of the nation’s chief justices, all men in dark formal garb, line the oak-paneled walls. Crystal chandeliers hang from the high, gold-glazed ceilings. The large elegant room on the east side of the corridor holds a gleaming grand piano. This is where the entertainment takes place. Across the hall, food and drink are laid out on silver trays and white linen–covered tables. As the end-of-term party for June 2010 was approaching, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., sent invitations to the staff. He mentioned the customary platters of hors d’oeuvres that would be offered and the law clerks’ musical parodies that would be presented. He also reminded invitees that the party was open only to full-time Court employees, not to part-time workers, interns, or contractors—another sign of the special nature of this event at this elite place.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican, was about to attend her first such party. The nation’s first Hispanic justice had joined the Supreme Court the previous August, a 2009 appointee of the nation’s first African American president.*
Sotomayor had already shown herself to be a different kind of justice. She was more social than the others, kicking up her heels at parties that made the gossip columns. When she danced with actor Esai Morales at a National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts gala, pictures of her in a shiny black jacket and pants went viral; ditto when she donned a New York Yankees jersey and threw out a first pitch for her adored home team. She reveled in the attention.
A few weeks earlier, in June 2010, she had returned to the Bronx as the guest of New York City officials who had renamed the housing project where she grew up. The Bronxdale Houses had become the Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses.1 As she stood before three hundred cheering people, Sotomayor recalled how hopeful the Bronxdale Houses had seemed in the late 1950s when she moved there from a run-down tenement. Mayor Michael Bloomberg called her an inspiration to millions of New Yorkers. Later she sang and danced onstage with the choir from her high school. Wearing a bright red jacket, she was loose, at ease, seemingly all confidence.
Now she was back at the Supreme Court for the culmination of her first term and the end-of-term party.2 After the justices and staff heaped their plates with food, they took seats for the entertainment. Sotomayor sat near the front. So did Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose husband, Martin, had died three days earlier after a long illness. Ginsburg, a survivor of two serious bouts with cancer, had prided herself on not missing a single day of Court business during her husband’s illness. She was exhausted but not about to skip this celebration. Her close friend Justice Antonin Scalia, always an easy target in the law clerks’ parodies because of his exaggerated mannerisms, secured a spot along a back wall of the room. As the rows of wooden chairs quickly filled, other people began to line the walls, too. About two hundred employees crowded in.
Chief Justice Roberts began the festivities with a Jeopardy-like trivia contest. The three-clerk teams, named Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, fielded his queries as an aide kept score on a whiteboard. Next, the musical spoofs began. Law clerks—the young, mostly Ivy League–trained attorneys who assist the Court—assumed the roles of the nine justices and poked fun at their foibles. The clerks kept these parodies tame. Certain expectations of decorum permeated the Marble Palace, as it has been called. Precedent and consistency were valued in the justices’ relationships as well as in the law.
Justice Sotomayor was about to upset those expectations. As the skits were ending, she sprang from her chair, turned to the law clerks, and declared that although their musical numbers were all fine enough, they lacked a certain something. With that, a law clerk cued salsa music on a small portable player, and Sotomayor began dancing. She took quick steps forward, then back, and turned, then went forward, back again. The Cuban- and Puerto Rican–inspired rhythms were as new to this setting as the justice who was dancing. For her salsa partners, Sotomayor first grabbed a few law clerks, who, it became clear, had arranged this diversion with her. Then she beckoned the justices, starting with Chief Justice Roberts. A buttoned-down man who rarely shed his suit jacket at the Court, Roberts was reluctant, looking terribly uncomfortable. The audience was apprehensive. By tradition, this was an event where the law clerks performed and the justices watched. Roberts decided to be a good sport. He got up and danced with her. Briefly.
Sotomayor’s barrel-ahead style clashed with the usual order and predictability at the Supreme Court. The institution operates on a down-to-the-minute schedule. Everyone knows his or her place, which corridors are open, which are closed. Steady, quiet rhythms control, for better or worse, reflecting the ideal of consistency in the law. But now a justice was dancing salsa in a room where portraits of former chief justices set the stodgy tone. Sotomayor’s hips swayed to the beat of the distinctive drums and horns, and as her thick, curly black hair fell into her face, she brushed it away with her hand.
As she sought out partners, nervous colleagues danced a bit, one by one, then retreated to their chairs. Justice Anthony Kennedy, six foot two and favoring dark suits with coordinated tie and pocket handkerchief, did a jitterbug-style move. Justice John Paul Stevens, at age ninety the eldest, got up, too, but he felt as if he had two left feet and quickly sat down, happy to watch Sotomayor move on to other partners.
“Where’s Nino?” she shouted toward the back. Scalia, his thinning black hair slicked back, started to shake his head. There was no way he was going to dance. But then he did, sort of. Justice Samuel Alito, tall and shy, looked even more awkward when Sotomayor got to him. He resisted. But the rest of the audience was into the spectacle now. People were standing up, laughing and whooping. So Alito stood and danced a little bit. Then Sotomayor went toward Ginsburg, who had just endured some of the most difficult days of her life. She did not want to rise from her chair, but Sotomayor whispered to her that her late husband would have wanted her to dance. Ginsburg relented and followed Sotomayor in a few steps. Ginsburg put her hands up to Sotomayor’s face. Holding her two cheeks in her palms, Ginsburg said, “Thank you.”
As the program closed and people began leaving the room, emotions were strong. It had been a difficult term, and Sotomayor’s enthusiasm was catching. Scalia, who could shake things up in his own way, joked as people passed him near the doorway, saying, “I knew she’d be trouble.”
But some people were not as amused, and the episode increased their skepticism of Justice Sotomayor. They thought she was calling too much attention to herself, revealing a self-regard that challenged more than the Court’s decorum. One justice and one top court officer said separately that it was just too much blurring of the lines between the clerks, who traditionally took the stage at the party, and the justices, who sat in judgment in the audience.
But that was Sotomayor. She had spent a lifetime challenging boundaries and disrupting the norm. And this episode as she was ending her first term testified to why it was she who became the historic first at the Supreme Court.3 She was not one to wait her turn. If she had waited, or held herself back at crucial junctures, she would not have been there. And once there, she believed it should be in her own hands to define her presence. Before this first end-of-term party, in fact, she had lined up a book agent and begun negotiating a publishing contract to write her autobiography.4
This book tells a different story. Rather than biography, it examines the cultural and political shifts that merged with Sotomayor’s life and led to her appointment. It is a tale of how the timing of her generation helped lift up the daughter of a nurse and factory worker. While Hispanics were emerging as a political force in America, Sotomayor was overcoming her own hurdles and walking the narrow line between identity and assimilation. She had the intelligence and perseverance to do what no other Hispanic had done.
A child of housing projects who graduated from Princeton University and Yale Law School, Sotomayor, through her life story, tracked the ascent of Latinos in America, with their growing numbers and influence.5 She was born in 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education, which ended the doctrine of “separate but equal” and opened schools to blacks and Hispanics. It was also the year of Hernandez v. Texas, which marked the first time the Supreme Court held that the Constitution protected Hispanics from discrimination with the same force as it protected blacks.
Sotomayor’s formative years in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the civil rights efforts of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos. Her life and career paralleled the activism and progress of her people. She went from a timid schoolgirl who kept her head down to an assertive woman who learned to maneuver in a predominantly white male world, gaining admission to Princeton and Yale partly through racial and ethnic preferences. “I am the perfect affirmative action baby,” she said early in her career.6 Once she became a lawyer and set her sights on the federal judiciary, she won lower court nominations, in part, because of her ethnicity, and she was approved only after close calls and fortuitous timing. Patrons such as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who amassed and wisely used his political cards, played a recurring role in her story. Those connections and her own savvy helped her navigate a system known for ravaging nominees, especially when race or ethnicity was an element of the nomination.
Sotomayor watched in the 1990s and early 2000s as advocacy groups tried to position other lawyers to be the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court. Among them were federal judge José Cabranes, who was born in Puerto Rico and came to the mainland with his family at age five, and Washington lawyer Miguel Estrada, a Honduran who immigrated as a teenager. Only after they and others fell out of contention because of the politics of the day did Sotomayor represent an obvious choice when President Barack Obama—whose own 2008 victory went against the odds—sought to choose the first Hispanic justice.
Yet Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court might not have been this Puerto Rican daughter of the Bronx. One of his mentors from his Harvard Law School days was against it. “Bluntly put, she’s not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is, and her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire and simply add to the firepower of the [conservative] wing of the Court,” wrote Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, an important liberal voice in American jurisprudence.7 Tribe, who later altered his opinion of Sotomayor, had been Obama’s professor at Harvard and an early supporter of his bid for the presidency.
Obama himself was ambivalent as he faced the 2009 vacancy after the retirement of Justice David Souter. Obama saw the political value, certainly, of naming the first Hispanic justice. But the man who, as a student, had held the top editorship on the Harvard Law Review and then taught at the University of Chicago Law School had his own elite interests. He was attracted to other candidates he knew from Chicago’s academic enclave of Hyde Park. His preliminary list, right after the 2008 election, was topped by three names: Diane Wood, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit who lectured at the University of Chicago; Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor who earlier had taught at the University of Chicago; and Elena Kagan, a former University of Chicago professor who had become dean of Harvard Law School.8
Sotomayor’s inclusion on Obama’s expanded list arose from her education, experience, and connections, as well as the diversity she would offer. Her appointment might perhaps be compared to that of the first African American justice, Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights giant who developed the strategy leading up to Brown v. Board of Education. President Lyndon B. Johnson had chosen Marshall in 1967 as part of the president’s broader civil rights efforts. Johnson, who had been the force behind the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, sensed that public attitudes about race were changing. His nomination of Marshall was a principled move, to be sure, yet not one without political calculation.9
But any comparison between Marshall, a first-generation civil rights advocate, and Sotomayor, heir to the Latino pioneers who came earlier, goes only so far. What’s more, while Johnson was on the cutting edge, Obama’s choice of the first Latina felt overdue. For years, decades even, presidential candidates had been vowing to appoint a Hispanic justice. In 2009, when it finally happened, Hispanics represented 16 percent of the United States population. During the 2000s, the Hispanic population grew four times faster than the overall U.S. population.10
Opposition to Sotomayor at the time of her nomination came not in the form of the outright racism that Southern senators had shown Marshall in 1967, but in the subtle bias of commentators that she was not up to the job. Such criticism portrayed her as an intellectually inferior jurist and offered a narrative that competed with her personal story of success. She would later say, “It was very, very painful both on the court of appeals and on the Supreme Court nomination process that people kept accusing me of not being smart enough. Now, could someone explain to me, other than that I’m Hispanic, why that would be?”11
Such bluntness separated Sotomayor from others who jockeyed for position in the nation’s capital. She spoke candidly of cultivating the necessary skills, building the networks, and overcoming personal setbacks. Her Supreme Court appointment was the culmination of an ambition stoked early on. In law school, she said, she realized the role individual judges could play in social justice—to protect voting rights or reduce segregation. “The idea that a single person could make such a difference in the cause of justice was nothing less than electrifying,” Sotomayor wrote in her memoir, “and having more or less accepted the primacy of career in my life, I saw no reason to stint on ambition.”12
Having achieved appointments to lower federal courts in the 1990s, she was careful to avoid controversy and continued to build alliances. She also did not tamp down her heritage or personality. She was not someone who “happened” to be Puerto Rican. She talked of eating such island specialties as pig intestines. And when it came time for her to administer her regular shot of insulin to care for her diabetes, she did not retreat to the ladies’ room. Even at fancy dinners she took out the kit she always carried and injected herself at the table. Her unvarnished approach sometimes discombobulated associates, but it also conveyed an authenticity, even a vulnerability, that drew people to her.
In her early years at the Supreme Court, she elicited intense admiration alternating with annoyance for her garrulous, forceful style. She was a different model at an institution where justices, as a group, have been relatively bland and socially conforming, even as they differed radically on the law. What passed for flamboyance at the Court would generate a yawn in other venues. When Roberts’s predecessor as chief justice, William Rehnquist, put gold stripes on the sleeves of his black robe in 1995, mimicking a character from Gilbert and Sullivan, it made national news.13
What follows is, first, a story of fortuitous timing and alignment with national events for a woman who was determined—as seen at her first Supreme Court end-of-term party—to stand out. Her ethnic identity helped her get ahead, but only after she surmounted hurdles that stopped most of her Latina cohort and, in point of fact, stopped almost everyone else seeking great stature in the judiciary.
Sotomayor’s voice has been heard in a memoir that has earned her millions of dollars and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. She connects with people beyond the Washington Beltway as no other justice has. People reach out to hug her. She is a magnet, especially, for children. When Pew Research polled Hispanics on community leaders in 2013, Sotomayor and U.S. senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, topped the list of those named.14
She attests to the dreams and aspirations of America. It is in the national fiber to believe someone can come from nothing, work hard, and become something. But Sotomayor’s rise has not been without adverse reactions. The justice appointed for life still has her doubters, and it remains to be seen how she will answer them over time. She has played up her ethnicity and celebrity status as a “first,” in contrast to the man who put her where she is today. President Obama rarely gives voice to his experience as the child of a black father and a white mother, and in political Washington, only on the most exceptional occasions does he speak about race in a personal way.15
This book offers an early look at how Sotomayor is publicly defining herself and compares her with other groundbreaking justices and her contemporary colleagues. The contrast with Elena Kagan, President Obama’s second appointee, offers one measure. Justice Kagan has become known as a shrewd tactician among her colleagues. She has been held up by White House officials as a model for Obama appointees to all federal courts—a judge who has the “potential to persuade” conservative colleagues.16 Kagan’s pattern on the bench and in opinions indicates that she sees herself operating strategically as one of nine justices. Sotomayor, in contrast, is more of a solo operator, engrossed in her own determinations on a case, less interested and adept in getting others to adopt them.
As she challenges presumptions about how justices act and enlarges their place in the American mind, it may be that the personal characteristics that propelled her to this moment in history prevent her from being most effective. It is not clear that the popularity she has achieved outside the Court can be matched by a persuasive ability within its marble walls.
She has begun to make her mark, primarily by seeking fairer procedures for criminal defendants. Her writings reflect the knowledge earned in a big-city prosecutor’s office and years presiding over trials, as well as the more personal experience of being a Latina.
As surprising as her salsa dancing was at the first end-of-term party, some justices say it now seems to have reflected the core of her character. She shakes up the proceedings and confronts her colleagues in their private discussions of cases.
When she asked them to dance, they did. On the law, they may be less likely to follow.
Copyright © 2014 by Joan Biskupic
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Soto by Joan Biskupic. Copyright © 2015 Joan Biskupic. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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