Sonia Sotomayor: When Checks and Balances Fail, ‘Do You Understand What You’re Losing?’

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Many Supreme Court judges have written books, but few of those are targeted for a reading audience under 10. That demographic presents unique challenges that even the greatest legal scholars would struggle to overcome, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an audience at the George Washington University Thursday evening. She herself worked long hours editing her latest picture book, "Just Shine!: How to Be a Better You."

"You have to take a complex idea and simplify it so a four- and an eight-year-old can understand it," Sotomayor said, and that's not easy. "Sometimes I've played with one word for, like, days."

Sotomayor visited GW with David Tatel, retired judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to discuss their recent books and the power of telling their own stories. Their conversation was moderated by NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg.

Sotomayor said "Just Shine" took inspiration from her late mother, Selena, with whom she reconciled in midlife after a difficult childhood that left her feeling "angry" and "abandoned." Her mother did not often show affection; she worked nights and was often away on weekends, trying to escape her marriage to Sotomayor's alcoholic father. But as Sotomayor grew older, she began to understand how her mother's own upbringing had affected the way she parented.

"We are imperfect as human beings," Sotomayor said. "We have to forgive each other."

Both Sotomayor and Tatel have dealt, for most of their lives, with disability-Sotomayor with type 1 diabetes, Tatel with a degenerative retinal disease that left him blind. His 2024 memoir, "Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice," tells the story of his decades-long legal career, during which he refused to discuss his condition publicly. In fact, Totenberg said, in years past she'd tried to pitch the judge on a story about how he dealt with blindness, but he'd politely and consistently declined to be involved.

By the time he wrote "Vision," however, Tatel was ready to talk. For one thing, he no longer feared that his story would affect the way he was seen or treated: "After all my decades on the D.C. circuit, I became confident that people viewed me not as a blind judge, but as a judge who happened to be blind." He had also found an ally who changed his experience of blindness: his German Shepherd guide dog, Vixen, who joined him onstage (and immediately became an audience favorite).

Tatel and his wife, Edie, navigated the "shared experience" of his blindness together for decades, as did their children and grandchildren. But now, accompanied by Vixen, Tatel could take on unaccompanied tasks and errands that previously would have been impossible. "She gave me and Edie a level of independence that neither of us have enjoyed for decades," he said.

At the same time, Vixen's presence made Tatel's blindness legible to others and a subject of discussion with strangers in a way it hadn't been before. When you use a cane on the street, he said, no one approaches you to tell you what a "cool cane" it is. With Vixen, such conversations are inevitable.

"You can't be a user of a guide dog and be uncomfortable talking about blindness," he said. "It just doesn't work."

Similarly, Sotomayor spent much of her life staying silent about her diabetes, which sometimes caused her to pass out. As a college student, she was given a single room because she would be medically required to keep syringes there, a fact that "wasn't advisable to have everybody in the school know."

"In our generation, people were taught to hide," she said. "The world is much more open and much more encouraging, thankfully, of people in terms of understanding that differences are not bad. Differences just are."

Only one moment of the evening touched on current events, when Totenberg asked Tatel about a passage in "Vision" in which he discusses his reasons for retiring from the bench. After a 30-year career partially inspired by the integrity of judges who upheld their Constitutional convictions over segregationist laws in the South, he said he'd lost faith in the institution of the Supreme Court, whose rulings he was legally required to follow. Tatel wrote that he was "tired of having my work reviewed by a Supreme Court that seemed to hold in such low regard the principles to which I've dedicated my life. It was one thing to follow rulings that I believed were wrong when they resulted from a process I expected; it was quite another to be bound by the decisions of an institution I barely recognized."

"I'm comfortable with the way I wrote those chapters," Tatel said. "When I wrote the book, the threat to democracy at the time is one that I thought came from the Supreme Court itself…The threat we face today is different."

Totenberg then turned the question to Sotomayor, who has written what Totenberg called "passionate dissents" in severalrecent decisions carried by the Court's conservative majority. How, Totenberg asked, does she "carry on?"

As a justice herself, Sotomayor responded, she "has a platform that David didn't." When he disagreed with a ruling, his opinion was disregarded as a matter of law. Whereas when she disagrees with her fellow justices, she "can tell them they're wrong."

"I like the platform of not pretending," she said.

Sotomayor said her differences with the current Court also drive her investment in civic education, especially for children. For people to build a better future, they have to understand how government works, how laws are made and how societies change. And the earlier that education starts, the better.

"Do you understand why we have three branches [of government]? Do you understand how and why our Constitution was written in the way it was?" she asked rhetorically. Members of the executive, legislative and judicial branch "have to check and balance each other. Some of that check and balance is disappearing, but do you understand why? And do you understand what you're losing when that happens? I don't know that most people do, and that's what I fear the most."

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