“We can’t do that as judges,” Sotomayor said. “We can’t engage the public in a seminar about health law.” . . .
People would find it “very unsatisfying” to try to interact with justices on social media, she said.
However, Sotomayor noted that she and her Supreme Court colleagues can and do interact with the public in other ways — by teaching constitutional law, presiding over moot courts and giving public lectures.
“We’re all participating publicly, just maybe not in the way the public would like us to,” she said.
And for all those who say I have no practice experience because I only clerked:
“You can learn more in one year of clerking than you learn in eight years of practicing at a firm,”
So I clerked for three years. I suppose that means i have 24 years of practice experience? Hell, I should be retiring already at that clip!
This part interested me:
At the close of the event, law school Dean Michael Fitts announced the creation of a scholarship in Sotomayor’s name for Penn students who aspire to the judiciary. Fitts and Sotomayor attended law school together at Yale University.
The justice expressed her gratitude, noting that she attended college and law school on scholarships because her family could not otherwise afford it.
“I’m so grateful to the school,” she said, “for passing it forward to someone else.”
Can you imagine the gunner who publicly states he/she wants to be a judge in law school! What kind of hubris and ego would such a candidate have? Blech.
A friend who attended Harvard Law School told me that in the office at the Harvard Law Review, a picture of Chief Justice Roberts hangs on the wall from his time at HLS. Everyone aspires to be that. Only one of them (maybe) will ever get there. The rest of them must be quite disappointed when it doesn’t pan out.