On Videos, Sotomayor Says She Was an ‘Affirmative Action Baby’
Judge Sonia Sotomayor says in videos turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she was an “affirmative action baby” admitted to Princeton University and Yale Law School despite lower test scores than other classmates.
The Supreme Court nominee made the remarks to illustrate why she believes it is critical to promote diversity by appointing more women and minorities to judgeships, the New York Times reports. She spoke some time in the early 1990s, according to the video label, on a panel discussing women in the judiciary.
In the video, Sotomayor said her lower scores were “not so far off the mark that I wasn’t able to succeed at those institutions.” Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and was an editor on Yale’s law journal.
“With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates,” she said in one video. “And that’s been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that. There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects.”
