Friends Provide Glimpse Into Sonia Sotomayor's 'Very Full Life'

Sunday, May 31, 2009



NEW YORK -- Last November, soon after Barack Obama was elected president, a close friend of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's was hospitalized on Long Island because of a series of strokes.

Speculation was already swirling that the new president might make Sotomayor his first pick should a vacancy open on the Supreme Court. Sotomayor also had a full caseload she was balancing as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in Manhattan.

But three or four times a week, Sotomayor would leave work around 7 p.m. to visit her friend. Ever the urbanite, Sotomayor would pick up some chicken soup, get in her white Saab convertible and wind through rush-hour traffic to Long Island to sit by the bedside of a woman who was often unconscious and unaware that Sotomayor was there. Finally, the trips came to an end in April -- not because of the pressures of the trip on her busy life, but because her friend died.

Those visits, recounted by several of Sotomayor's closest friends, provide a telling glimpse into the private life of the woman nominated last week by President Obama to be the next Supreme Court justice and the first Hispanic on the high court. The friends go on to describe her in laudatory, if predictable, ways: collegial, intensely loyal, a bedrock in crisis.

But another portrait emerges as well in their descriptions, one that sets her far apart from the retiring justice she would succeed . . .


read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/30/AR2009053002061_pf.html

on the SC.

I LOVE her!!!

Have to try to meet her in DC!!!!

DC'ers, wanna join me???

is what you are when nobody is looking.

We went down that road w/my mother, it's a helpless feeling to not be able to see progress. Only the brave will stay and wait for the end.

Can't say the same about Robot Roberts, Fat Tony or Snaky Sam Alito.

. . . and empathetic