By Jimin Kang
Contributor
Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, justices on the Supreme Court of the United States and alumnae of Princeton University, spoke to an audience of over 3,000 last Friday evening about the Court’s need for neutrality in a “polarized” political environment.
Sotomayor, 64, said that the “politicization” of the court can be attributed to political parties “adopting” different ways of interpreting the constitution.
“Part of the court’s strength and legitimacy depends on people not seeing the Court in the way that people see the rest of the government structures of this country now,” said Kagan, 58, who was the first female Solicitor General of the United States before joining the Supreme Court in 2010. “It’s an incredibly important thing, this reputation of being fair, of being partial, of being neutral, and of not being simply an extension of the polarized political process and environment that we live in.”
“Our political parties have adopted the academic discussions that justices are having along the line about how to interpret law in the constitution,” said Sotomayor, who joined the Supreme Court in 2009 after serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She talked about “originalism”—the judicial interpretation of the constitution in “the way the Founding Fathers have done”—and how political parties have divided themselves along “originalist” and “non-originalist” lines.
“We have to rise above partisanships in our relationships,” she concluded. Both justices talked about the court’s interactions outside of work, which allow them, according to Sotomayor, to “find the good in every person.”
“The rules are that you can’t talk about work, you can’t talk about cases, so we can talk a lot about families, or books, or movies,” said Kagan.
The justices’ talk was part of the three-day She Roars conference at Princeton University, which invited alumni back to campus to partake in talks, dinners, and events to celebrate the influence of women at an institution that admitted its first female undergraduates in 1973.
Sotomayor and Kagan, alumnae of the classes of 1976 and 1981, respectively, shared stories about being women at Princeton, the Supreme Court, and other places.
“I don’t believe that you can’t be part of the working world without having a story about being treated differently because you’re a woman,” said Sotomayor, of her experiences in professional settings.
She talked about an experience in which her professor had to “fix” a joke in case it would be offensive to Sotomayor, who sometimes found herself to be the only female student in the classroom.
“Obviously I got used to Princeton, but it does take a while if you’re from a different environment,” she said.
Kagan, who was the first female dean of Harvard Law School, spoke of several difficulties she encountered in that role, which included some faculty members not thinking of her as “their boss.”
“When you’re a woman, and you’re a younger woman, as I was, it was a hard thing to do,” she said. She acknowledged, however, that she had expected “more resistance” than what she actually experienced.
