Justice Sonia Sotomayor (Photo by ERIN SCHAFF/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed, we lost our only civil rights lawyer. That kind of diversity, diversity in experience, is something that I think we are sorely missing. …
There are so many areas of law that the court touches, and whose decisions impact in such tremendous ways, that I do worry that the authorities who are selecting judges are not paying enough attention to that kind of diversity as well.
— Justice Sonia Sotomayor, commenting on the Supreme Court’s lack of professional diversity, during an appearance to celebrate the five-year anniversary of NYU Law’s Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. On the topic of racial diversity, Sotomayor said she felt intense pressure as the high court’s first Latina justice. “If you are a person of color, you have to work harder than everybody else to succeed. It’s the nature of — the competitive nature of our society — where you have to prove yourself every day,” she said. “And I don’t know many people of color who don’t come into this enterprise without feeling that pressure of knowing that they have to work harder.”
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.