I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences. Today is one of those experiences.

The challenges I have faced - among them material poverty, chronic illness, and being raised by a single mother - are not uncommon, but neither have they kept me from uncommon achievements.

I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

As a Catholic, you can have two views on capital punishment. You can think, let Caesar do what Caesar needs to do, and the law says you can impose capital punishment, so you impose it. You can [also] be a Catholic who says we can't kill, we can't kill babies and we can't kill adults. If you let a decision be driven by your personal views, then you are not doing what a judge needs to do, which is enforce the laws of the society that you are in. But you can control your own behavior, and that is the choice that the church and God gives us - what kind of people are we going to be.

I wouldn't approach the issue of judging in the way the president does. Judges can't rely on what's in their heart. It's not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It's the law.

I am a very spiritual person. Maybe not traditionally religious in terms of Sunday Mass every week, that sort of thing.