A welcoming staff greeted more than 700 attendees, many of whom patiently waited for over an hour among the blossoming trees gracing the campus at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. As a security precaution, people with bags had them sniffed by a canine trained to detect explosives. They’d come to hear U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor discuss her autobiography My Beloved World and, as it happened, dispense aphoristic life lessons about “being who you really are.”

Questions about current politics, rulings on cases that are before the court, or that could come before the court were verboten, leaving personal reminiscences and general observations about the state of “the law” as the main subjects for the lively and crowd-pleasing discussion.

School President Mark Roosevelt introduced the 61-year-old Justice as “garrulous, curious, convivial and incredibly generous” and jocularly promised to “question her like she’s never been questioned before.” But given the restrictions on the discourse, most of his queries were what might be termed “lifestyle” questions, e.g. about influential books, on being a lifelong outsider, about being prepared for life’s contingencies, gender differences in asserting one’s voice, and affable musings about white male privilege. To this last she confessed: “I’m a little envious. It’s nice to live a privileged life; it makes things easier.”

Feeling the crowd’s approbation, Sotomayor descended from the stage to walk among the people seated in the crowded rows, who seemed to increasingly warm to the story of the little girl from public housing in the South Bronx, a girl afflicted with juvenile diabetes, who somehow found purchase in the American dream and had made it her own. “I have a job for life,” she said with a smile.

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