I am growing to love DC. But the core of Sonia is a New Yorker.

When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences...our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.

I didn't know I had a sense of limitation until I got into the greater world.

I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I'd feared.

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.

how many times would a defendant's lawyer enter the courtroom before a session and ask each of the male clerks and paralegals around me, 'Are you the assistant in charge?' while I sat there invisible to him at the head of the table?