Just a year after the class of 2020 read U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir, “My Beloved World,” they and the rest of the student body will have the opportunity to hear Sotomayor tell her story in person.
Sotomayor will visit Feb. 7 to engage in a conversation moderated by President Christina Paxson P’19 at the Pizzitola Memorial Sports Center at 12 p.m, according to a University press release. The class of 2020 read Sotomayor’s memoir as part of the University’s First Readings program in their summer before coming to Brown and discussed it at the beginning of their first semester.
“The challenges I have faced — among them material poverty, chronic illness and being raised by a single mother — are not uncommon,” Sotomayor wrote in the preface of her memoir. “But neither have they kept me from uncommon achievements.”
Born to Puerto Rican parents, Sotomayor lived in a housing project in the Bronx during the 1950s. She worked her way to Princeton before graduating summa cum laude in 1976. From there, Sotomayor graduated from Yale Law School, where she worked as editor of the Yale Law Journal.
After working as an assistant district attorney and then as a partner in a private law firm, Sotomayor served as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1998 until 2009. She assumed office as a justice to the U.S. Supreme Court in August 2009 following a nomination from former president Barack Obama.
Sotomayor made history by becoming the third woman and first Hispanic to ever serve on the Supreme Court.
“Sonia Sotomayor’s success is not only testament to her resolute ambition, drive and intellect, but to the vital importance of role models, mentors and opportunities opened for historically underrepresented students,” Paxson said in a University press release. “To hear her share her story in person is an ideal culmination of the class of 2020’s First Readings experience, and it will undoubtedly inspire all of us at Brown.”
