Legal News

Portrait of the Judge . . . As A First-Year Torts Student

By Dionne Searcey

Tucked in a Connecticut office are telling notations of a famous law professor's thoughts about the exams of his soon-to-be-famous law students.

The professor: Guido Calabresi, one-time dean of Yale Law School who now sits on the Second Circuit. The class: first-year fall-semester torts. Among the many students who’ve learned Palsgraf and the eggshell-thin skull from Calabresi: Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito; White House counsel Gregory Craig and former U.S. Senator Jack Danforth. The student of the moment, however, Sonia Sotomayor.

"I went back and found Sonia's name in my 1976 fall torts class," said Judge Calabresi, reached in his chambers. "And as I had remembered she wrote a terrific exam . . . And I'm not an easy person on that."

First-semester exams at Yale are pass/fail, so Judge Sotomayor didn't get a letter grade. But Judge Calabresi said he noted on the paper that she "knew her stuff and that she handled law and facts well, she was careful but had originality."

That said, Judge Sotomayor wasn't always a great student, according to a passage in this NYT story about her essay-writing troubles at Princeton. “When Ms. Sotomayor arrived in Nancy Weiss Malkiel's history class in the spring of her freshman year, for example, she seemed unprepared, Ms. Malkiel recalled in an e-mail message. But Ms. Malkiel tutored her in how to read sources and write analytically, and by late in the semester, Ms. Sotomayor was flourishing."

Her former boss as a prosecutor, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, said he recalls her telling him she nearly flunked out of her first year at Princeton because her writing skills were so poor.

Judge Calabresi says his former student-turned benchmate on the Second Circuit has on occasion swayed him on occasion with her powerful memos. "She's also somebody who is charming and friendly," he said.

Judge Sotomayor is the informal social organizer of the court, arranging after-work dinners for the justices. "Things often get tense and going out to dinner together is nice," he said.

Sadly for us, Judge Calabresi won't give up the goods on his other famous students (yes, we asked). "Maybe in 20 years when I'm long gone," he said.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 27, 2009 (boomark / email).