how do you view it from the inside? i mean, how does the court and family, community adjust to those moments? i m going to steal a line from one of my colleagues, a story, actually, not a line. and it was justice thomas who tells me that when he first came to the court another justice approached him and said i judge you by what you do here. welcome. and i repeated that story to justice kavanaugh when i first greeted him here. now, i ve known him, i ve known of his work. but when you re charged with working together for most of the remainder of your life, you have to create a relationship. the nine of us are now a family, and we re a family with each of us our own burdens and our own obligations to others, but this
so i could ve taken the bus? yeah. bring your phone. switch your carrier. save hundreds a year with xfinity mobile. call, click or visit a store today. you were diagnosed when you were 8 with juvenile diabetes. 7 1/2. and taught yourself at that very early age to inject yourself with insulin. you wrote in your book that one of the reasons you never had children is that you really didn t expect to live beyond the age of 40. and i m now 64. i was proven wrong thankfully. how did that change the way you approached life? not in a big way. because the one thing i took out of the lesson of my diabetes and that fear of dying young was
the hardships in their lives that i never ever knew about. yeah. there was and is a very dear friend from yale who i knew had come from the south, but i had absolutely no knowledge of the extreme poverty he had grown up in. in fact, i just assumed he was another one of the privileged people that i had gone to law school with. and he wasn t. i think we often forget that even here among american citizens there is a lot of inequality of resources and of other types. there are hardships that people live with each day that make their lives very different from whatever others think is the norm. and so that outsider feeling, it s more common than we re
hand that raises. now, i will then ask i m assuming some of you may have been there because one of your family members have been in trouble. but have you ever taken the time to get to know them as people. and the answer too often is no. and the reverse is true. because if you ask in many communities, not all, inner city communities, you ask police officers, have you ever do you have any friends in that community whose homes you actually visit for a meal, and the number of hands that raise are very few if any. but i actually do think that we have to spend a lot more time seeing each other as human beings. and not objects of our work or objects of our resistance, as
extension of a long history. well, regrettably, and one of the purposes of my memoir was to introduce people to puerto rico. my sense in most situations and people often call me an immigrant, and i look at them and say wait a minute, i m a citizen. i was born a citizen. i was born in new york city, but putting that aside, puerto ricans. my belief, and i think it s still my belief, most americans think of puerto ricans as foreigners in some way, not realizing that we re citizens above all else. and so one of the purposes of my memoir was to introduce them to my island and explain some of its history. i do think that the that