Justice Sonia Sotomayor to Visit the Law School
The University of Chicago Law School will host U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a conversation with law students on Jan. 31.
The visit will give law students a valuable opportunity to hear from the distinguished jurist, and to ask questions about her service on the nation’s highest court. Justice Sotomayor was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama in 2009.
"We are greatly honored to have Justice Sotomayor visit our Law School,” said Law School Dean Michael Schill. "Justice Sotomayor is an inspiration to many of our faculty and students. We all can learn much from her."
A native of the Bronx in New York City, Justice Sotomayor is the Supreme Court’s 111th justice, its first Hispanic justice, and the third female justice. Prior to her appointment, she served for 11 years on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She replaced Justice David Souter on the bench as the only current Justice with trial judge experience.
The program will start with an hour-long conversation between Justice Sotomayor and David Strauss, the Gerald Ratner Distinguished Service Professor of Law, followed by another hour of Q&A with law students. After the event, Justice Sotomayor will attend a lunch with Law School faculty and teach a criminal law class.
“Justice Sotomayor is an inspiration, not just to lawyers but to everyone,” says Strauss. “She has had a remarkable and distinguished legal career as a prosecutor, a lawyer in private practice, and a judge at every level of the federal court system. And as President Obama said when he appointed her, she has ‘not only the knowledge and experience acquired over a course of a brilliant legal career, but the wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life's journey.’”
Strauss, a leading constitutional law scholar, is an editor of the Supreme Court Review, along with Geoffrey Stone and Dennis Hutchinson. He has argued eighteen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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