Justice Sonia Sotomayor ’76 Discusses Rule of Law in Q&A for Princeton Students

American democracy and the rule of law require active participation and “an investment of time and energy and passion,” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor ’76 told an audience of nearly 900 Princeton students at Richardson Auditorium April 11.

“Laws are made by people,” she said. “People change laws. Voting changes laws. It requires effort. If there’s a law you don’t like, it’s there because a group of people wanted that law and worked hard at getting it passed. If you don’t like it, you have to band together and work at getting it overthrown.”

She also made a brief nod to current events, saying, “Right now we’re in a tumultuous state and one that’s going to require a great effort from us as a nation to figure out what path we’re going down, and is it the path that we want, as a collective.”

Sotomayor, in an hour-long conversation with President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, spoke about her career, the role of the courts, and her advice for aspiring lawyers in response to questions submitted in advance by undergraduate students. Each time a student’s question was read, she invited them to the stage to shake hands and pose for a photo.

The justice was on campus for the dedication of Sonia Sotomayor Hall (formerly 36 University Place) and the unveiling of a new portrait of the justice that has been added to the University’s permanent art collection.

The previous evening, Sotomayor featured prominently in the Supreme Court’s ruling on the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a migrant living in Maryland whose removal to a prison in El Salvador in violation of a 2019 immigration judge’s order was termed an “administrative error” by Solicitor General D. John Sauer.

While the court ruled in Abrego Garcia’s favor, requiring the government to facilitate his release, Sotomayor criticized the government’s actions in an additional statement, joined by Justices Elena Kagan ’81 and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “To this day, the government has cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador, or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison,” Sotomayor wrote. “Nor could it.”

Sotomayor told the Princeton audience that she does not speak about cases that are before the court or are likely to come before the court, because it is important to show that she keeps an open mind. But she did share a recent vignette about her fellow alumni justices.

“Sam Alito [’72] and I and Elena were walking out of the robing room together,” Sotomayor said. “And Sam said, ‘Do you know Elena? They’re honoring her with a building.’ And he walked out and looked at her and said, ‘Do you think they’ll ever do that for us?’”

Sotomayor was the second Supreme Court justice to speak on campus in less than two months, following Kagan, this year’s Woodrow Wilson Award recipient, who visited on Alumni Day Feb. 22.

Sotomayor graduated from Princeton with highest honors, received the Pyne Honor Prize as a senior, and served on the University’s Board of Trustees from 2007 to 2011. After 17 years as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, she was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice in 2009, becoming the first Latina on the nation’s highest court.

Five years later, Sotomayor received the Woodrow Wilson Award, and in her Alumni Day speech, she issued a call for Princeton to act “in the service of humanity, one person and one act at a time.” The “service of humanity” part has become part of the University’s unofficial motto and is inscribed in stone on the walkway leading to Nassau Hall.

Sotomayor Hall houses the Emma Bloomberg Center for Access and Opportunity, the Center for Career Development, the Admission Information Center, and a U-Store location. Princeton first announced the Board of Trustees’ approval for the renaming in March, completing a process that began in 2019 when the Committee on Naming first sought suggestions from alumni and the campus community. Professor Stephen Macedo, the committee’s former chair, said in a news release that Sotomayor’s career “has exemplified to an extraordinary degree this University’s core values of service, truth-seeking and justice.”