I think it's important to move people beyond just dreaming into doing. They have to be able to see that you are just like them, and you made it.
Oh my God, I don't think you can say anyone looks forward to controversy.
There are uses to adversity, and they don't reveal themselves until tested. Whether it's serious illness, financial hardship, or the simple constraint of parents who speak limited English, difficulty can tap unexpected strengths.
I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability.
I listened very, very carefully to the world around me to pick up the signals of when trouble was coming. Not that I could stop it. But it made me observant. That was helpful when I became a lawyer, because I knew how to read people's signals.
I have had positive experiences with cameras. When I have been asked to join experiments using cameras in the courtroom, I have participated; I have volunteered.
In examining witnesses, I learned to ask general questions so as to elicit details with powerful sensory associations: the colors, the sounds, the smells that lodge an image in the mind and put the listener in the burning house.
My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.
I am a very spiritual person. Maybe not traditionally religious in terms of Sunday Mass every week, that sort of thing.
The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.
I do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge regardless of their background or life experiences.
There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.
All judges have cases that touch our passions deeply, but we all struggle constantly with remaining impartial.
I am a New Yorker, and 7:00 A.M. is a civilized hour to finish the day, not to start it.
My diabetes is such a central part of my life... it did teach me discipline... it also taught me about moderation... I've trained myself to be super-vigilant... because I feel better when I am in control.
If you're poor, you don't often live near a good school. If it's a competitive public school program, our kids are not prepared to enter those programs.
My job as a prosecutor is to do justice. And justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and an innocent man is not.
I think that the day a justice forgets that each decision comes at a cost to someone, then I think you start losing your humanity.
