LAKE FOREST PARK — We live, to read the recent dissents of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in dark times.
The senior-most member of the U.S. Supreme Court’s liberal wing, Sotomayor has warned, with mounting urgency, of an executive branch, a presidency, that can violate constitutional rights at will, and of a judicial branch, her own court, that again and again gives its blessing.
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” Sotomayor wrote Monday in a case about immigration enforcement.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” she wrote earlier this summer. “I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law.”
“Ours is a government of laws, not men,” she wrote in June. “By rewarding lawlessness, the Court once again undermines that foundational principle.”
“In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” she wrote last year.
On Friday night, at a bookstore in a Seattle suburb, Sotomayor didn’t paint a much brighter picture.
“Think about how bad the world is right now,” she said, mentioning wars in Europe and the Middle East, and problems with health and the environment. “We’ve messed it up.”
But, she said, she remained hopeful. She talked about American history — it took a century after the country’s founding to end slavery. It took another century after that to end legal segregation. Women can vote today, she said, because other women fought and died for the right.
“We have people who are courageous enough in every generation to get up and fight the battle,” she said. “That’s what gives me hope, that there are good people in the world.”
But she was also cheerful, joyful, encouraging. About halfway through her hourlong talk, she left the stage (to the apparent consternation of her security team) and, as she spoke, roamed through the audience giving hugs to any kid who would take one.
“That’s what brings me joy,” she said. “Those hugs, I’m collecting them now to brace myself for this year.”
“Beautiful dress and I love the shoes,” she said to one little girl, interrupting herself.
Sotomayor was at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park on a book tour to promote her new children’s book “Just Shine!: How to Be a Better You.”
She took only three preselected questions from the audience.
Speaking to a rapt, sold-out crowd of several hundred, she barely mentioned her work on the Supreme Court, instead talking about her mother, her love of libraries and books, and how “the unicorn is my favorite animal.”
Sotomayor, it turns out, is a fantasy fan.
“Have you kids ever seen a dragon?” she asked. “I still read about dragons, I am 71 years old.”
Her new book tells the story of a Puerto Rican girl named Celina, who “treated people with respect and recognized their dignity” and “worked hard to make other people’s lives just a little bit easier.”
Celina was Sotomayor’s mother, “and my best teacher,” although, she said, she “spent half my life angry at my mom.” She was angry because her father was an alcoholic and her mother worked nights “and I resented that my mother abandoned us to him.”
It took years, she said, to get past the anger.
She talked about how her mother made her visit people in the hospital, brought food to sick neighbors and brightened the lives of those around her.
“What you really need are people in the world who care to do the small things that make a difference,” she said. “It’s the small things, that’s what the book is trying to show kids. You don’t have to be president of the United States to change the world.” The crowd murmured. “Although it does help sometimes.”
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