U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor visited CUNY Law earlier today, for an event titled “My time as a law student.” Two students, one full-time and one part-time, asked her questions submitted by other students.
My reporting may read as quite critical of her. Broadly, I don’t think Supreme Court justices get anywhere near an appropriate amount of criticism and scrutiny compared to the immense power they all wield, even for the “liberal” justices in the minority.
With that in mind, I think it’s worth starting with something that most media organizations (unless you’re Ken Klippenstein) shy away from: her health. No video recording was allowed, so you’ll have to rely on my written descriptions.
Sotomayor will turn 72 in a few months. In the CUNY Law auditorium, there are three steps to get on or off the stage. There is no handrail; every time she went up or down, she needed two people to hold her.
To her credit, she didn’t just stay seated on the stage, she slowly walked through the crowd while talking, regularly taking breaks by leaning on a desk while posing for photos with students.
Sotomayor stated early on that because she can multitask, it was fine for the students to read the question out loud while she was posing for photographs. She initially seemed quick on her feet but made some factual mistakes throughout that surprised me.
The first question was about what law school classes she’d recommend us students to take. She started off with “as many legal writing classes as [we] could take.”
She said that if we can’t explain ourselves in writing, we’ll never succeed at anything in life, regardless of the profession. “The ability to explain yourself in writing is what will get you heard.”
The second skill she said to develop is public speaking, and to find opportunities for it, even if law schools don’t offer it as a class.
She prefaced her third critical skill as something that didn’t exist when she was in law school: AI.
“AI may be the revolutionary technology of your century”, Sotomayor said. “It is going to absolutely alter every single profession in the world.”
A few days ago she had dinner with her former law clerks, she said one told her that they laid off half of their paralegals because of AI. Another clerk told her that all their associates use AI to help draft their briefs.
Sotomayor explicitly described it as “not cheating” and that the skill to learn is how to use it “smartly and understanding its strength and limitations.”
After sharing an anecdote about how her most recent mammogram was read by AI and apparently not a human, she put it even more bluntly.
“You should not be graduating without taking an AI course,” Sotomayor said.
After those three “critical skills” (writing, public speaking and AI), she said that aside from our normal doctrinal classes of contracts and constitutional laws, we should take classes outside what we plan to practice to gain a broad understanding of the profession.
Sotomayor explained that she took an estates class and now all of her relatives, despite her telling them to consult a lawyer, ask her for help with their wills. She also took a tax class, because taxes are relevant to everything — even civil rights.
“Where do the rich get all their money to oppose civil rights?” she asked. It wasn’t clear to me if she was implying support for taxing the rich.
The next question was from a classmate of mine who was formerly incarcerated, asking about the impact and role of lawyers who were formerly incarcerated.
Sotomayor started by acknowledging that lawyers who were formerly incarcerated have made great law clerks, but didn’t know if any had ever been a clerk to a Supreme Court justice. Some of her former district court and circuit court colleagues had hired former inmates as clerks, but apparently she has never done so.
She noted that having relevant lived experience makes you better at what you’re doing, and that type of diversity was just as important as racial or ethnic diversity.
“When I’m asked what’s the greatest flaw on the Supreme Court today, I could name many things,” Sotomayor said. “But the one that stands out to me is our bench’s lack of depth in lived experience.”
No sitting justice has had civil rights experience since Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she said. Odd for her to ignore Clarence Thomas, who briefly worked in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights before running the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Then she incorrectly stated that no current justice has criminal defense experience, which was shocking given that one of the things Ketanji Brown Jackson is best known for is being the first federal public defender to be appointed to the Supreme Court.
Relevant to today, she said none of the nine justices have experience with immigration law. She recommended students not try to just follow what past justices have a history of doing, but rather pursuing whatever interests them, as the standards for picking justices will constantly change.
Next question: what advice do you have for new lawyers going into the profession? She said that despite it being a totally new thing, not to be scared.
Sotomayor started her legal career as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. After failing to obtain convictions in two cases that she felt she should have, she discussed it with her supervisor (or possibly mentor), who explained to her that she couldn’t just let the evidence stand on its own, and that she needed to turn the facts into feelings that would change the jury’s mind.
After that, Sotomayor said she never lost another case (with the exception of a hung jury).
“The most powerful weapons we have as lawyers are words,” she said. “Words can kill … Words can build courage in a way that nothing else can. Words can exceedingly powerful things.”
Sotomayor grew up in the projects in the Bronx and worked her way up to attend both Princeton (undergrad) and Yale (law school). The next question asked about her journey in doing so, and how she navigates being in elite institutions.
She started by noting that her poverty was different than what Thomas endured, as he had grown up in the south where he suffered a more “extreme” type of persecution. And that immigrants come here having faced even worse poverty and situations than what she went through.
At Princeton she said she didn’t understand the opportunities she was missing out on, and wished that she had gone to the theater or attended free concerts that her classmates were going to.
Sotomayor said that everyone wanting to become a lawyer should have the goal of bettering the world we all live in. And that we should not to aim to destroy their world (i.e. do not destroy “elite institutions”) but instead meld them with the world we came from.
The next student question was about how lately the law feels oppressive and supporting those in power rather than protecting the vulnerable.
“If your goal to become a lawyer is to win every case, then leave law school,” Sotomayor immediately answered. “You are a lawyer to fight for lost causes. You will lose cases,” she said, in stark contrast to her earlier remarks about her never losing a case again.
She said these people need a voice, they need a champion, someone who will stand by them even when it seems hopeless.
But then she attacked the underlying premise of the question, which is that in fact the law has rarely been a reliable tool for positive social change, and for most of history it has been oppressive — I agree!
Dred Scott lost every state and federal case he filed, including in the Supreme Court, she said, reiterating its place in the anticanon as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever.
She continued, emphasizing that it was only through fighting the Civil War was Dred Scott able to regain his citizenship. Sotomayor recited most of the Citizenship Clause, which is currently under attack by Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship and in front of the Court. (She misattributed it to the 13th Amendment instead of the 14th.)
Then it was another hundred years until Brown v. Board of Education, which itself was one of the few success stories amongst many, many failed civil rights cases that were filed at the time, she said.
But she said she still believes in the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote about how the arc of the universe bends towards justice.
A good friend of mine was able to snag the last question, asking about what advice she’d give to law students who followed non-traditional paths and are starting their legal careers later in life.
Sotomayor said to never be afraid of saying “I don’t know.” She said that even in conference, if she doesn’t understand something, she’ll ask someone to explain it.
It’s not stupid to not know something, she said, rather it would be stupid to not know something and then not say that you didn’t know! She encouraged everyone to ask professors questions whenever they don’t follow something in class or have doubts.
Personally I really appreciated the event, Supreme Court justices can often feel like larger than life figures, so it’s nice to get the opportunity to see and hear from one in person. I’m glad CUNY Law is able to attract an interesting set of speakers for us to engage with.
As part of Boba Quest 🧋, I'm trying and reviewing a new boba shop each week whenever I have time.
I was recently walking down the street earlier this week and noticed that the location that used to be home to Möge Tea (reviewed in Jan. 2025, 6/10) had a new sign up: Arteassan.
As you may have read on the news, there is currently a blizzard hitting New York City, so I did the reasonable thing to do and hunkered down under a warm blanket went outside to try a new boba shop!
(In normal weather you can take the 7, N, W via Queensboro Plaza or E, F, R via Queens Plaza to get there but I'd wait until the weather improves!)
I ordered a Cloud Ceylon Brown Sugar fresh milk tea with regular (100%) sugar and light ice (it's cold out!). The barista said that "Cloud Ceylon" was similar to black tea (TIL that Ceylon is an old name for Sri Lanka), so I expected it to be similar to a standard brown sugar boba milk tea.
Boba: 3/4 the boba was well flavored, but just a little too chewy (not enough to be a problem but enough that I noticed).
Tea: 2/4 on the other hand the tea felt weak and not as strong as I would've liked it. I don't think it was the boba overpowering it either.
Bonus: 1/1 I'm going to give this as a pass today; it was clear they were still setting up the new shop and I don't want to penalize them for that. Plus, they were open during a blizzard! What more can you ask for? (Though to be fair, I walked past 3 other boba shops and they were also open.)
Total: 6/10, decent, but not worth getting in a blizzard. I'll probably visit it again in a month or two to get a more realistic impression.
Around the same time, King George III censored the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, requiring the removal of some anatomically correct drawings in an article about midwifery.
So when the 13 newly independent American states ratified the First Amendment a few decades later, it laid the groundwork not only for a free press but also for an encyclopedia that was not censored by an oppressive government.
Today, we celebrate the realization of that dream in the form of Wikipedia, which over the past 25 years has been collaboratively built by unpaid strangers on the internet. Wikipedia went from the source that teachers universally clamored "you can't trust it" to one of the most reliable sources in a world of "disinformation" and AI-generated slop.
Despite not being written by professional journalists (I edit it myself as a volunteer and used to work for its nonprofit host, Wikimedia Foundation), it's still able to set trends and drive narratives. For example, in 2011, Wikipedia editors started collating a list of people killed by law enforcement in the U.S., three years before The Washington Post would win a Pulitzer for its version of the same.
And for better or worse, Wikipedia is most likely the largest single source powering today's AI models. All in all, it's the largest repository of knowledge in human history.
But it's important to understand and appreciate that Wikipedia only exists because of the robust free speech and free press protections that exist in the United States.
Wikipedia has never been actively censored in the U.S., nor has any U.S.-based editor ever been arrested for their edits to Wikipedia. There's never even been a serious threat of censorship of Wikipedia by the federal government. (The FBI once demanded Wikipedia stop using its seal under a law written to stop impersonation of federal agents; Wikipedia's legal team laughed it off.)
The same cannot be said about Wikipedia in other countries. In France, intelligence operatives held a Wikipedia administrator until he deleted an article about a military radio station, under the guise it contained classified information. Agents made this demand even though the information in question wasn't classified at all and was mostly based on a documentary that the French air force had worked on and publicly released.
In India, a court required Wikipedia to remove an article about a news agency because it was supposedly defamatory. To top it off, the court then demanded Wikipedia remove the separate article that was written about the court case and removal order!
This kind of censorship shouldn't happen in the U.S. The Supreme Court ruled the First Amendment protects publishing classified information in a case about the Pentagon Papers. A U.S. court cannot order an article to be taken down, as that would be an unconstitutional prior restraint.
In the U.S., the law known as Section 230 would also protect Wikipedia from defamation claims, and instead require litigants to sue the editor who actually wrote and published the allegedly defamatory content. Those editors would be protected under the First Amendment and the high court's New York Times v. Sullivan decision, which requires defamation claims from public officials — later expanded to public figures — to meet the much higher standard of actual malice to win (nearly every biography on Wikipedia is of a public figure, by policy).
And to state the obvious, the U.S. has never blocked all of Wikipedia, unlike China (since 2015), Myanmar (since 2021), or Turkey, which did so from 2017 until an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights forced that nation to unblock it in 2020. We know of one editor, Bassel Khartabil, who was executed for their online activity, and a few others who are incarcerated in Belarus and Saudi Arabia.
Certainly, there are plenty of people in power who wish they could censor or control Wikipedia. At first, it was through editing: In 2006, a number of Congressional staffers were caught whitewashing their bosses' biographies, and, in 2007, someone at the FBI tried to remove images from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp article.
Then, in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked that the National Security Agency was illegally spying on Wikipedia readers and editors, revealing that the U.S. had adopted the same playbook as China. Wikipedia responded by encrypting all connections using HTTPS a few years later, and (unsuccessfully) sued the NSA for First and Fourth amendment violations.
It will require a concerted effort by all of us to not just maintain existing First Amendment protections, but to expand them. That's the only way Wikipedia will thrive for another 25 years.
As part of Boba Quest 2025 🧋, I'm trying and reviewing a new boba shop each week whenever I have time.
It's been a while since my last boba review, but sometimes you visit a new place that just inspires you to write about it. ChaHalo recently opened in Long Island City, right in between the Queens Plaza station (E, F, R) and Court Square (7, E, F, G, R) so I thought I'd give it a try with my sister, who was in town for the holidays.
My sister wanted a drink without lactose, and since they didn't have an alternative milk, she asked for a jasmine green tea with boba. The barista added the jasmine green tea to the order and then said: "I'm sorry, our computer won't let you order boba with this." Whaaaaaaaaat. And then, "But we could give you some boba in a separate cup?"
What kind of boba shop offers a drink that you can't add boba to? And not even like some practical issue, it's that their computer can't handle it.
I was able to order a jasmine green milk tea with brown sugar boba without running afoul of any software restrictions. (There were no other boba options aside from brown sugar.)
Boba: 3/4 the brown sugar boba was actually pretty good, well flavored, maybe just a little overcooked.
Tea: 1/4 it was...not good. It was a bit bland to the point the taste of the boba totally overpowered it.
Bonus: 0/1 sorry, our experience didn't merit any bonus points.
Total: 4/10 honestly, if they served a brown sugar milk boba (with lactose-free options!!), I think it would be near perfect.
This story has a somewhat happy ending, in that we walked to a different tea shop across the street and my sister was able to get her lactose-free boba. Stay tuned for that review!
I just finished my first semester of law school Tuesday evening...only eight more to go! People say that the first year of law school is the worst, and I certainly hope that's true.
I don't think I've ever had so much information dumped into my brain in such a short period of time. In my Liberty, Equality and Due Process (LEDP) class about the Fourteenth Amendment, I took 109 pages of notes, and for Criminal Law, 54 pages.
As a very very condensed version of what I learned, here are the study guides I made for both classes:
I cannot yet vouch for the accuracy contained on those guides yet as I haven't gotten my grades back yet, but I think they're mostly correct!
Next semester is contracts, which'll probably be immediately practically useful, and legal research, which I'm really looking forward to. I now have access to Westlaw, which is both amazing in how rich the content and interface is...and terrible how it's all locked in a commercial, private database.
There have been a lot of Zohran Mamdani thinkpieces since November 4th, and I've read most of them! But I want to add three takeaways that I really haven't seen discussed elsewhere in detail.
In the past few weeks people have talked a lot about how Obama's volunteer army fell apart after he was elected and how Mamdani campaign leaders are trying to prevent that from happening by launching "Our Time", a separate entity that can organize former campaign volunteers and keep them politically activated.
But more immediately, I think it's worth understanding that there was a specific effort to prevent a repeat of Buffalo's 2021 mayoral election in which a socialist (India Walton) upset the incumbent mayor (Byron Brown) in the Democratic primary, so Brown launched an independent campaign for the general, rallied the Democratic establishment to support him and not Walton (the Democratic nominee), winning the general by 20 points.
With that context, it made perfect sense that immediately after the primary we saw Zohran moving to consolidate the establishment behind him, including labor and elected officials. It mostly worked, just about everyone backed him except Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Oh and Jay Jacobs, the chair of the state Democratic party, who refused to endorse Zohran just like he refused to endorse Walton, except at least this time he didn't compare the socialist upstart to David Duke!
But I have yet to see any reporting on how many volunteers came down from Buffalo to support the Zohran campaign in the final stretch. I met a decent amount of people who were very open about why they had come to the city: to prevent a repeat of what happened in 2021.
Because of the natural-born-citizen clause in the U.S. Constitution, Zohran is ineligible to run for U.S. president. Meanwhile it was incrediblyobvious that Andrew Cuomo was running for mayor to relaunch his political career so he could run for president in 2028. That would follow the recent trend of NYC mayors running for president, including Bill de Blasio (2020), Michael Bloomberg (also 2020) and Rudy Giuliani (2008).
And of course, way too many people touted Eric Adams as the "future of the Democratic party" and a future presidential candiate. Oops, should've listened to Andrew Yang.
I think it's underrated that Zohran can't run, and so after the primary win, there was no endless dicussion of whether he'd run in 2028 or some made up hypotheticals of him vs. AOC as to who should be the left's standard bearer, etc. And, it's much easier to convey and convince people that Zohran was genuinely interested in improving the lives of New Yorkers as the mayor and not just using it as a stepping stone to higher office.
In 2024, it very much felt that Indians were moving right, with Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy rising in the Republican ranks and Kamala Harris losing. Polling indicated Asians broadly shifted right (though I didn't find anything about Indians specifically). Not to mention the backdrop of Modi's right-wing government rising in India, which undoubtedly affects the views of the diaspora.
Anecdotally, the WhatsApp forwards were getting worse.
Zohran is easily the most high-profile Indian American politician in the U.S., but more importantly, his campaign was backed by incredibly strong South Asian turnout across the board, with Indian turnout rising from 18% to 45%. To quote: "South Asians and Muslims account for just 7 percent of the city’s registered voters, yet they cast an estimated 15 percent of all ballots in the general election." The aunties are activated.
People keep repeating how this mayoral election was like none other, and I geniunely have no idea what they mean. This was my first mayoral election as a New York City resident so it's also my baseline. I expect things to only go up from here, starting with the special election for my assemblymember and then the open primary for my U.S. House district.
