An hour with Justice Sonia Sotomayor

from florine hall at the kansas state student union at our prisons an hour with associate justice sonia sotomayor of the us supreme court i'm kay mcintyre sotomayor is the us supreme court's newest member sworn in by president obama in august two thousand nine she is the third us supreme court member to speak a kansas state university as part of the landon lecture series former chief justice earl warren spoke in nineteen seventy justice sandra day o'connor in nineteen eighty eight unlike those justices sotomayor opted for a less formal format taking questions from us district court judge john one strum of lawrence federal court of appeals judge did not talk also of lawrence and kansas state university student body president denny and these questions were submitted in advance from fairfield university students faculty staff and friends eighty years since i've been on this side of the bench justice under my arm refers to how we sit in seniority

of the courts of appeals and now in her court says she isn't exactly the right site today just a set of my are we want to welcome you to kansas and thank you for that warm place dave welcome even for some of us that are a bit foreign but not that much that we're so thrilled you're with us and that it was gratifying for judge wants to him and danny and me to receive and other proposed questions that so many students and faculty and staff people were able to submit restart justices sotomayor and say you know a lot of people out in the public here about the decision it's of the united states supreme court but i suspect you know what your day is like when she had just describe for us the sort of typical day for you and what do you as a justice of the united states supreme court i read

i read all day long i read certifications bench memos cert petitions for those who are not lawyers in the audience or request by parties for us to hear a case and they submitted greece explaining to us why we should our clerks in a bad part of a pool for peer a bench memo analyzing the claim telling us what the state of the y is and we then at a conference that we hold once a week on friday revealed a cert petitions that have come in and decide which of those cases were going out actually here for a lark we have about five thousand to fifty five hundred petitions a year and every one of them with the exception of a handful that get dismissed for procedural reasons every one of those is considered by all nine justices and voted upon that is actually a good part of my work every week i stand out a good

portion of it every week and reviewing certifications the rest of the time i'm reading parties brace i'm reading on the chi perhaps i'm reading the opinions and memos of my colleagues i'm firing off responses to them if you think that making decisions among nine people it's easy to remember what you go through at home when you want to decide what will be the go to i'm a soul mate the issues a bit more complicated and you have to understand that every time an opinion is drafted there's a whole lot of back and forth among the justices about even small words and a lot of it plots but everything is reviewed very very carefully before to shoot and then i draft an edit opinions and the way that they are majority opinions

concurring opinions were just sets each one is a major undertaking and so the days are mixed with lots of different activities feasibly the war and that's the core of power and then there's a part of my work that i didn't appreciate as fully as i thought when i took the job and that's the education reporter for work ah i always to you both as a district in circuit court judge in under a truck in both roles to interact with the public because i'm a very very firm believer that lawyers and judges have an obligation to educate about both what we do about the line about our democracy generally and so i've always spent time with student groups world that's continued but imagine that when i was a judge in new york the group's eyesore world has new

york roots and i thought ok now to see groups from across the country so far park and they come from well they come from everywhere but they also come from around the world almost on a daily basis although i try one day a week not to meet with groups so that i can actually concentrate that's my paper opinion writing and i don't like being interrupted but generally four times a week and meeting with groups whether there will improve student groups like that second graders i've met with children from special needs glasses and spent time talking to them i've met with senior citizens i've met with veterans groups i have met you name a group and they come visit our court and to the extent that i can i'd visit with as many as ike groups as i can but it could become a fulltime job for you to try to win with a little bit of that but we also have visitors that official visitors from around the world i've met with the presidents of countries who have come to

visit and just talk with mat with the un with the un secretary we have met with judges supreme court judges judges and justices from around the world so the educational component of the work is very very significant that's the day of witnesses and as my mother said one of my first day back visiting her after my appointment some reason i thought you'd be reading less you're reading more so did the day in the life of a judge reads me justice sotomayor on behalf of the twenty three thousand plus is against a welcoming campus were very glad to have you here as a group of people that are going to be entering the workforce and starring or years i'd like to ask what was the most defining moment that directed your career in your opinion

danny i don't i can't tell you that that was once said that one moment one event that actually said this is going to define my career but it was a sequence of events at each of them sort of calm and eighteen in the moment i stood before the president when he nominated today as his candidate for the supreme court i've often been asked and i really believe it was going to happen and my answer often is you really have to train so things that you don't really believe that can happen to you how many of you have been you know ace pitcher major league teams how many of us have dreamt about being president at some point in your life how many have seen themselves up on the big screen and yes some people to achieve those roles

but i think most of us myself in particular i wanted to be a lawyer when i was ten to nine and a half ten years old and my reasons were very simple and really uninformed and a little pollyanna but as i develop that i got older blues feelings have really never left me i loved of all i love the profession of layering an eye toward being a judge and politically napping at justice but the moments remained were at nine and a half when i realized that as a diabetic that i couldn't be nancy drew a detective i have to figure out what i could do instead and i saw rick perry mason one night and for the youngsters in the room which is probably everybody under the age of

thirty in this room perry mason was one of them first if not the first television shows about wearing and perry mason in trying criminal cases and their specific discussion of my confirmation hearing and i turned out to be right there was one the one case that he lost track he lost at trial a couple of others but he won on appeal but there was only one precincts but perry mason spent the first half of the show investigating the crime and the second half was a court and see and at nine and a half i looked at what he was doing and i said she i could be an investigator as a warrior just like nancy drew so that's what i want to be and i got it it continued watching perry mason and in one episode the after perry had won yes yet again he met up with the prosecutor at a

restaurant and say to the prosecutor that he recognized how much work the prosecutor had put into the case and that although he perry was very happy that his client was proven innocent that he understood that it could be disappointing to the prosecutor and the prosecutor looked at him and said there you don't understand it's my job to to justice and justice to me means that those were guilty are convicted and those were innocent are suffering and that has stayed with me my entire life i am just a justice of the supreme court some of you or in law school or into read about how simplistic that idea and it is but it still inspires and not letting

innocent people go free or convicting people i'm actually not doing that any more not a trial judge i'm not a prosecutor anymore but i am enforcing the rule of law and so on that sequence of events was really what set me on my path and then each moment that came after in which i made career choices including when i graduated from law school it was a foregone conclusion us to be a prosecutor i had a fortuitous meeting with bob morgan all the most venerable prosecutor in new york and completely by accident i met him at a conference and he we stood next to each other have a conversation and he said to me come into view with meat marc i was going to the state department and instead i went to interview with him and to make a long story short he offered me a job and i went a little bit with my intuition and took a job so one of the lessons from when i'm

telling joe typecast herself and don't judge the choices you're making follow a passion even if that action is not the norm i have met the council actually love bookkeeping i don't know but i know they do i haven't met stock brokers investment bankers janitors taxi drivers people in all walks of life who actually take a joint from what they do because it's it's there and i think that one of the things that people credit that is they fret about doing something that's important but the post polson words sometimes you do things you do become part of history and i've been fortunate enough to do that right now but the reality is that

most of us spend our time doing work and it should be work they chew like doing and say you shouldn't fall the advice of others about what's right for them you get to figure out what feels right for you and do that my feeling about that is set in the end if you like what you're doing you're going to do it well and you're going to be noticed ends the taxi driver who has a fleet of passengers who take care of him or her when theyre sick is getting more as much satisfaction as i am from the work and so that really is what i've tried to do in my life is to figure out what i liked what makes me passion you mentioned that a moment ago that's a sower of those in the crowd who are

under thirty and i think there is a substantial group in the crowd who were students here to tag a stakeout right right sincerity state and i'm sure a number of them are interested in the possibility of pursuing a legal career and yet at the same time there's been much written and talked about lately a concern of changes in the legal profession about bait burdening debt load that one often requires law school job prospects becoming a dimmer and so forth what can you say to the students here today about whether or not the law is an area that they should consider going into him in the face of all these obstacles that maybe i'm being pres well first of all a money to encourage you to go to law school

if you actually like to study of law don't do it because it's a korean just as i explained earlier career is a career of passions of passion and you should try to join the two but assuming that the process the method of thinking about issues that is provided by the law appeals to you this time worrying about making money when i graduated from law school at my at my first job i was making more money than my mother had made her entire life that i gave up jobs that would have paid me four times more than the job title and even my mother was selling are you nuts and what i said to her was so i

think we think about the crew re years as financial and they have to be on some level you gotta work you have to support a family you have to educate children but we live in a society in my judgment that has over big ambitions about what success means my family was a happy one living on virtually nothing and i don't recommend that to people i like four am them but what i'm trying to say is even if you're not going to get a job in a big law firm they're still medium and small law firms that need you there are government jobs public interest jobs and apple pay as much but there's all sorts of work in the legal profession whether it's at law schools in think tanks into a variety of different places including newspapers who want trained lawyers to write articles are health check on facts

corporations who hire lawyers not just in their legal department but his advisors to strategic thinking there are shops may be a little harder to get some of them it says but everyone struggling finding work right now in the end if you like what you what the law is you'll find work and the benefit of the law degree is you even have to be a lawyer look at how many presidents how many senators and congresspeople governors and mayors politicians of all kinds have legal backgrounds look at how many business people who've never practice the day of law went to law school because they thought it would give them some help in analytical thinking i believe it does and so i start with the proposition that if it's something you want to do remember that there's an awful lot of variety in the choices you make and that the only thing you have to do

is be willing not to think just about money just a semi arid i think often in the rhetoric in and perhaps abroad and society there's a lot of concern about to judges to make the law or did they interpret the law what do we do i hate that says analysts conversation you know how much i was asked about that at a senate hearing thank you for asking in civil law countries which are most of europe although the europeans are moving closer to the american common law system people in the civil law countries the only writes you have are the ones that are explicitly stated in the statute

because of that i think it started the common law interpretation not just from england but as the framework of our constitution we don't approach was generally in the civil manner and we set forth the general legal principles general statements about what congress wants to accomplish with a society to accomplish the rights it wants to do and it gives the courts the job of them ensuring that the borders of whatever congress has said in the law are understood and i talk about borders because congress generally passes along thinking about one situation but human nature the situations are endless that law would apply to me and so we're being asked to take those things congress couldn't have thought about but that

fit within the potential umbrella of a lot and define the parameters of that it's a sort of things like the baseball rules the baseball rules tell you what the strike zone is but the umpire has to use judgment about where the ball hit in that strikes and for those of you who have ever played umpire you know a lot of those polls are right on the line so that itself that way or this way and so for those we'll have to see an opinion and say she when those judges thinking up while with it thinking of is what's my best interpretation of what the law means and how it applies to this situation for some

they called in some situations making law but judges still approached a process that way they take the tools analytical tools they're given the introduction tools they're taught and they applied them to the situation and try to come to an answer on tour their best you using those tools of what the law says so i don't think that's making law but i do think that the people who asked that question sometimes still appreciate the complexity of what judge it involves just a semi where you spoke earlier about the large amount of reading they duper week what other efforts to make continually to learn as a public judicial official about changing affairs the nation so heading to the polls danny i saw this question

before and i've been thinking about i read the newspaper i do watch the news occasionally i'm not a tv watcher but i do follow the news i think everybody who works on the internet goes through it constantly so it too but the way i have virtually my entire life getting a pulse what goes on is by just talking to i can't say that i think i got this from my mother if you put my mother on the bench she'll make a friend of the tree her daughter didn't fall that far from that train i spend all my time where ever i am talking to whoever i need to learn a little bit about that what they do what they feel about what they do what is troubling then if they start talking to me about something that's

bothering them sometimes i do what brings them joy and for me that's my way of staying in touch with the world and i tried to go to as many new places including cancers as i humanly can give them the limits placed upon me by my job but i also tried to talk to people who do things that i don't know anything about sex and learn a little something new so that's how it you know we've talked about a number of things here that involve evolution and change in the way things have developed one of the things that a number of people ask questions about the law is its ability to keep up with technological change obviously our constitution comes from an era of them so different from the one we're in today you're much of our statutory

laws by its very nature out dated in terms of the sort of technology that it was around when certain statutes passed and so forth how does the law keep up with this revolution in technology is that as we go forward john i think there's two components to this question tom and the first is how the judge's stay on top of technological and scientific developments that some music i'm for any judge who's handled the patent case a computer related case any of the complex technological cases it is not easy and some levels to be a judge however you have to have a curiosity about everything so it's one of the wonders of being a judge we get to learn about every other person's life i think of myself as a voyeur an unwelcomed intruder

on people's lives on welcome because if you're a quarter unhappy about something that happened to an idea to listen and watch what you're saying to me i'm learning about something that i may have no familiarity with and then try to help you resolve a problem involving that issue so i think judges do it by just a version themselves in the issues in learning him and trying to understand with the help of the party's what's at stake and what the issue's mean but then there's a second component which is the learning from palm print in the law and they are times that i worry about technology because of the information overload it is and i think that i don't think that that's a problem just a lot

i think that's a problem generally there's so much information and how to go through it and find that which is reliable is very very difficult unlike most people if i'm coming across something new or something that i want a quick study on i go to wikipedia but you want to know something i know what a pda is not a learned treatise and yet there are some lawyers who have cited it in greece that's gary baum hey that's not scholarship and that's my greatest concern not just that a lot of the society gay couple are just slightly what what about the impact of social networking on the legal saga of things and tweeting and facebook and so forth as it relates to the way in which judges lawyers in society interactive that the dinosaur the diminutive

guy and i don't think any of my colleagues on the supreme court and i'm probably ahead of most of them my use is i i i can only draft on the computer i actually know how to navigate and surf the wave it out i can answer emails with some my colleagues can't you know so it's not that i'm behind the times generally but the social networking has not been a part of my development either as a lawyer or assist or c judge remember it was only in nineteen eighty five that i went to my law firm and my law firm was further ahead technologically then the da's office was where we were still writing motions i a typewriter okay and i went to my law firm

and they were still using carts to print legal briefs for the students here i am don't understand that the pc and even the ability to social network it's not that old sow theory recent phenomenon we're still learning about the impact it's going to have on everything just a sweater i went to law school certainly and even when you went to law school it would have seemed very unlikely that either of us would be here in the capacity that we are many gains have been made in bringing diversity to all aspects of the economy and certainly to the bins the stillness however interested in your viewpoint about to the extent that it's appropriate about affirmative action and where we've come and where we might be and so what effect that's had on society and on the courts and specific affirmative action is a

buzz word that bristles with many people ends out there it's people who have hurt music and some speeches in the past in context have understood that i'd given my meaning and now the meaning that creates the bad reactions and so many inmates so many affirmative action means quarters and the definition of quarters is that you say i'm qualified people to fill a position a new bypass qualified people i was growing up it was the beginning of affirmative action and at the sky and it had a very different connotation it was a connotation in the society that there were social structures that had been built around preconceived

notions that excluded women and minorities from participating fully into society i'll give you an example of this in the lesson that i understood from him when i was a da you started out in the lower misdemeanor court handling petty crimes you eventually moved up to try felonies and bob morgan bought the time didn't move everybody up in a given year he would move people up in waves in the first group to be selected there were five bureau's with rocky da's that were selected to move up first four women and one was a woman like that when i read that the office was half women and i thought to myself this is orbits q and anne why is this cute because i had

watched the women and to me they seemed to be performing as well as the man and i kept thinking about it and i knew that the people that i worked quote worked with weren't consciously sexes so what was going on and i realized after a while that what it is is that if they want you have is male supervisors who had been very successful in prosecuting that their image of success by definition is going to be american that the people that have the most impressed by are the people like there and then i might have a slightly difficult more time seeing that the quieter woman might be just as effective but in a different way and in fact that was the case because women were

promoted some of them and then chile started trying as many high profile cases as the men and many of them became supervisors over time well so what did that teach me or what's the lesson i took from mad and it's a lesson that i took from affirmative action than the one that i understood from affirmative action as i understood it which was that it was a conscious choice by society to understand that the norms of selection and had set up were influenced by a system that excluded others and by that i mean if all the people you hire are people who go to to prep schools and most minorities don't go to prep schools do not have any minorities in your school so you have to sit down and say what is it about prep schools what do they teach and

how what is it about the students who go there and the ways in which they succeed and translate them will that have the security of picking people from prep schools and say i'm going to try other schools and see if they give me students of the same quality and i went to one of those high schools i went to a college prep high school in the bronx a catholic school but virtually nobody from my school had gone to an ivy league school and the first was the friend who helped me get into princeton i followed him and the doors to be ivy leagues looking at my high school as a feeder school opened but that was because of affirmative action because the school understood that its regular patterns have to be expanded and that to me is what

affirmative the real affirmative action making people's sensitive to why they're making choices to be thinking more broadly about the criteria and how it could be applied in in different settings and so i think we've made a huge amount games in that area but i do think we still have structural problems in the society that have to be addressed before we reach full equality and for me the most important of those is education we can't live in a society where the poor children are the poorest educate you're listening to the us supreme court justice sonia sotomayor on campus public radio in korea that's a structural issue that has to be addressed by the society because in my own community the hispanic community is you know we have the highest

dropout rate of any other group then perhaps the native americans a lot of that can't be tied to the reasons why we haven't reached and equality comparable to our presence in the population we don't have enough college graduates we don't have enough professionals competing for those jobs that are important in the society in terms of economic growth and so we become very very far but we still have fundamental structural issues that we have to fix before we can reach is equality justice what are the things you consider when deciding whether or not to grants or a ferrari in a case appealed to the supreme court and danny every question you asked me about what i consider understand that i'm still figuring out

our last year and i tell the story freely justice stevens certainly that what i thought was an extraordinary church were to force a pig and it with my mouth open and i called her not to tell him i would join but requested some changes to the opinion and said to him little desperate that i can do this and he said today sonia i've been on the court for forty years would you think i was born a justice system you've got all the tools you each year you're here who grow and that gave me so much comfort and so i'm thinking about all these issues and right now i am i feel

fairly closely to our rule about the cases one should take research you are in that supreme court ruled which basically has three or four different criteria for taking certain the first and the most important days that there's a circuit split and i have actually appreciated why that is you need a circuit split unique to courts disagreeing with each other to feel warm want them to courts disagree with each other to make sure that all of the best arguments on either side have been here before the supreme court gets and the reason for that is that when the court takes a case it takes the case in a particular factual setting and that's setting will only highlight certain consequences of the court's decision it's always helpful to have seen what's happening in the courts below in

different factual settings so you feel some comfort that all the arguments on both sides have been raised and that you've seen and now how this issue affects different actual situations so that is your decide what the law means you understand the consequences of what you're doing for it oh so i have understood the need for a second criteria is that state courts the federal courts are disagreeing surprisingly that doesn't happen all that often in a pure form state courts and circuit court seemed to define it equal numbers around issues but the fact that an issue may affect state courts more than federal courts can be and in some cases an important reason to take a case where the circuits are split as opposed to when the way the states are split instead of where this circuit has split

there is a question about eight an important federal question that requires answer that's where the court's judgment is probably the most exercise because virtually every cup ocean that comes to us is important so what's important enough to come to us in the first instance is really the nub of the matter and that's where i think the greatest learning by me is happening because that's not as easy to defy on and so those are the general criteria is our one lesson i've learned this is probably less important to this group here then to a lawyer or to a pure lawyers group fanny is not every case presents a question cleanly and by that i mean what we euphemistically called the legal problems that there are cases

represent the legal issue but before you can reach that legal issue this alive a procedural questions or other questions in bed in the case that might stop you from reaching the issue that's important and so a lot of times it may be a terribly important case but it has a serious problem because we'll never get to the huge we might never get to the issue so all of those factors go into us deciding when to take social or it won't i believe i'm correct in saying that you are the first justice in a long time to have served as a trial court judges was a court of appeals judge did you think that that has given you any different perspective or how has that if at all contributed to perspective as a us reporters who i am probably not exclusively

more interested in circuit procedural slips that my colleagues like that that and again to the lawn mowers if i can explain i just said to you that they are substantive meaty questions that are important that are circuit split surround but district court judges and circuit court judges work is guided by it happens by and controlled by procedural rules which parties have to follow before a court and get to the merits of the question and justice in all human endeavors years difference of opinions there a vast difference of opinions among judges below about the procedure rooms and the consequence of that is often to create or had extra district court judges for more

headaches for circuit court judges on how to reveal things and i think our see myself being much more sensitive to that than most of my colleagues on me a daily basis and i can tell you that it makes a difference but i think it's a voice in the room were were talking about whether to take certain cases and i haven't actually done the study myself but i think you may see certain kinds of procedural question is that more have been heard and to the extent that i may have my presence may have made a difference on the boat on those i think it does have an impact in the conversation me say on behalf of all of us that have to work with those everyday thank you very much and i know some of my colleagues would say i don't like clear substantive rules and that may be true sometimes as i also like giving you giving the courts

below a lot of flexibility on so well we thank you for that let's turn a little bit edgier crystal reactions to the court what surprise to the most and they're the same that time i was seeing things that would surprise a new justice about the thing that has surprised me the most that i did not anticipate was the bird and i would feel in my decisionmaking as a supreme court justice i had just really never thought so then adjusts for eighteen years when i first came to the district court one of my colleagues who later became and is a very dear friend came to see me and we were talking about a judge that had left the court a little while before and he said you know this judge was paralyzed with decision making he wasn't sleeping is a great lawyer but he had to leave the bench because he just put not take the

part and my colleague said to me so new for human beings the best we can do is to do our best in every case to pay close attention to the parties to hear them and to give the best answer we have or can it but we can't live with regret sit you have to move on to the next case and helped the next set of ports just remember there's a court of appeals in the supreme court to fix anything you do wrong class believe it or not that gave me an enormous sense of security moving forward and i always understood the responsibility of judging but i understood what he meant about understanding that my responsibility was that to decide the cases and let them go to the next chord is known export their

end i had not anticipated how that would feel i always paid very close attention to everything to the work i did but i find it heavier in a way i had i what had not worked on the supreme court when i was a young lawyer and so i didn't know what the building of the institution was like accept all of those books on the supreme court that i have read that some of you may have read about and to some of the stories they tell still really sound very nice as i was going into the process one of my friend's pickup and nine which i had and she called me up and she knew i had it by my bedside she had visited me for a ported and she said don't read the book you never take that job

i follow her advice i was too busy to read the book but i insel pleasantly surprised by the collegiality among the justices there's cheney when a faction among people and there's a genuine commitment to the institution to the court to its history to the work we do and it gets translated into everybody in our building who has any job in the building you can feel their reverence for the courts not necessarily for us as individual justices but for the court as an institution and that really is very special feeling when you go to work and you see that you're working

other people who really really are what they're doing on every level and so those things one not as pleasant the other more questions have been my biggest fans last year chief justice john roberts called the state of the union address a political pep rally and recently some of call korean participated in intermingled seating of republicans and democrats instead of the traditional partisan seeking justice sotomayor what do you think about this proposal not to talk about holmes and talk about some things at i think one of my best friends is a defense attorney who tried her first criminal case against me and me my second child and she will tell you and tell her

date she told her children for years when they would ask one the case we would both respond we both when we became friends i am until they got old enough to ask really when we were both young prosecutors week she was passionate about a giant i was passionate but her client should be convicted there wasn't an ounce were that either reverse or win on behalf of the interest that we were representing we thought oh certainly but to the nail in the courtroom and we walk down and admired each another to become friends to this day i can't say you how many calls i get from her saying what's wrong with you judge is still a criminal defense lawyer

and and down look at currents elving and i will get into a huge fight about whatever i've learnt in the practice of law that having commitment and passion and morals and integrity and abuse and all those things that portrait every human being that what helped me do my job better was that i understood that people who oppose what i was doing to possess those same qualities and i went that if i we still are to listen to them and respect that they were coming from the same place i was coming to different conclusions than i could do my job better so every case i would put

myself in the shoes of the other defense attorney try to figure out what they were thinking so i could anticipate my style strategy but i could only do that if i really respected what the rolls watts where i think that there is a conflict it in just as greene agreeably and people can do it i think it helps us reach better solutions that way even when once parties use the way down and the others do it's a dialogue with barry it enhances the discussion and so how i was there at the state of the union last year i was there this year personally i loved seeing john mccain ad kerry sitting next to each of them i didn't

and i sort of people who i saw are on different sides of the aisle during my hearing sitting next each and it was a much more pleasant from the other people may have different views but it for the reasons i said i like agreeable disagree without question whether an order pull the plug on a lot more eye contact they had run over but i don't want to bore people say hey we're aware at their disposal and what were the questions that that was proposed here i think is very interesting and you've touched on this but education you see the interaction between social issues that this is our country and the university in dealing with was how do you see that role as far as addressing the most important social problems that you think our country faces i think

that the role of the universities is to take students out of their comfort and introduce them to new experiences and new ideas different from the ones that came with challenging to the ones they hold and teaching them in areas they know nothing about i'm a firm believer in its advice i gave my niece and i will get my nephews were they ready for migrant children to go to college every one of them i say become a renaissance person college don't just take courses in one area take courses in everything they offer you want to grow up to be inform citizens so even if you're going to be a graphic artist at least understand economic theory even if you want to be a doctor like the law course it's not going to hurt you might even help you gather malpractice in the

hat i'm just sing about that but i do think that the role of the institution is to find ways to take students out of their comfort zones and expose them to more i know the premise is going to wrap us here but i'd like to say a word to all of you gather to enter the justice we're so grateful that you came during among the busy busy as times in the term to be with us and i would be remiss if i did not say that she is here also on behalf of the commemoration you should all know about which is it is the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the federal courts in kansas it is no surprise and no accident that we will celebrate a hundred and fifty years of statehood and a hundred and fifty

years of the federal courts this weekend because kansas was the frontier of the rule of law at the time and you may not know this there were more federal district courts in kansas during a certain period of time then there were anywhere else but back in those days because of the forest that were out here on this frontier so as you thank the justice for her appearance and her bridges a patient in an extremely important weekend for the state of kansas i hope you'll also reflect on your part in carrying that legacy for word of the rule of law on this frontier thank you to kc you've been listening to justice sonia sotomayor associate justice us supreme court sotomayor spoke at kansas state university on january twenty seven two thousand eleven as part of the landon lecture series she answered questions

posed by judged in elkhart judge john once john and kansas state student body president danny and rio justice sotomayor is the third us supreme court justice to speak a kansas state university former chief justice earl warren gave a landon lecture in nineteen seventy justice sandra day o'connor spoke in nineteen eighty eight sotomayor's appearance mark the one hundred fifty eight landon lecture at kansas state university i'm kay met entire k pr present is the presentation of kansas public radio at the university of kansas i know did you know that most k pr prisons programs are archived at our website just go to haiti are like hey you got edu news and k pr presence or you can search for a particular show haiti

are present and so much more on her website k pr back at ew dot edu