Sonia Sotomayor (2017)

Associate justice since Aug. 8, 2009

← Back to overview View 2017 Disclosure PDF

Positions

Positions are those where a justice was an officer, director, trustee, partner, proprietor, representative, employee or consultant for any organization other than the U.S. government at the time the disclosure was filed.

Report Year	Organization	Title
2017	iCivics	Governing director

Agreements

Agreements include any agreements into which a justice has entered, such as employment contracts, continuing payments from former employers and continuing participation in employee welfare or benefit plans maintained by a former employer.

No agreements

Noninvestment income

Noninvestment income includes compensation from jobs the justice has had, such as teaching roles; jobs at law firms before they were judges; pension benefits; and royalties for intellectual property, such as books and copyrights.

Date/Year	Organization Name	Amount	Purpose
Oct. 23, 2017	Penguin Random House	$40,000.00	Other Book-Related Income
July 13, 2017	Penguin Random House	$317,500.00	Other Book-Related Income
June 16, 2017	American Association of University Women	$2,000.00	Honorarium (Donation)
June 8, 2017	Penguin Random House	$40,000.00	Other Book-Related Income

Spousal income

Spousal income includes earned income from jobs a justice’s spouse has held, as well as honoraria. Justices are required to report a spouse’s income that exceeded $1,000 but are not required to disclose specific amounts.

No spouse-income

Travel Reimbursements

Reimbursements include any payment or thing of value received to cover travel-related expenses for justices and their families. They can include expenses that the third party paid directly or for which a justice paid upfront and was reimbursed, but justices are not required to report reimbursements’ dollar values. Show more.

Date	Source	Location	Purpose	Items Paid or Provided
Sept. 27 – 28, 2017	Dwight D. Opperman Foundation	New York, NY	Ceremony, Speaking Spoke at event honoring Judge Ralph Winter and presentation of Devitt Award	Food, Transportation
Aug. 6 – 9, 2017	Wayamo Foundation and Lawyers Without Borders	Arusha, Tanzania	Conference/Symposium, Speaking Participation in symposium; Q&A discussion with group of East African judges and attorneys	Food, Lodging, Transportation
April 28 – May 7, 2017	Università di Macerata	Macerata, Italy	Speaking Delivery of the Alberico Gentili Lecture and participation in two panel discussions	Food, Lodging, Transportation
April 6 – 7, 2017	Yale University	New Haven, CT	Ceremony, Speaking Speech at Liman Conference and participation in unveiling of portrait	Food, Lodging, Transportation
April 3 – 4, 2017	Albany Law School	Albany, NY	Speaking Participation in Q&A discussion with law students	Food, Lodging
March 31 – April 1, 2017	Princeton University	Princeton, NJ	Speaking Participation in interview/conversation with Margarita Rosa, Princeton Latino alumni organization	Food, Lodging, Transportation
March 10 – 12, 2017	Stanford University	Palo Alto, CA	Speaking Participation in Q&A discussion with law students	Food, Lodging, Transportation
Oct. 16, 2017	Hofstra University	Hempstead, NY	Speaking Participation in Q&A discussion with law students	Food, Transportation

Gifts

Gifts include gifts received by justices, their spouses or their dependent children from any source other than a relative. Justices are only required to disclose gifts whose aggregate value from the same source exceeds a certain threshold ($480 in 2023) within the reporting period and gifts that are individually worth more than 40% of that threshold. This only captures gifts that have been disclosed, which ProPublica reporting shows can be incomplete. Show more.

No gifts

Liabilities

Liabilities include debts that exceeded $10,000 at any time during the reporting period for justices, their spouses or their dependent children. Because justices have to report these each year, some debts may show up multiple times in the table. Show more.

Creditor	Description	Value
JPMorgan Chase & Co.	Mortgage Rental property, New York, NY	$250,001 – $500,000

Investments

Investments include cash accounts, property, stocks, investment funds, retirement plans and other financial instruments owned by justices, their spouses and dependent children in excess of certain value thresholds or generating more than $200 in income in a year. Justices are not required to disclose information about their personal residences unless they generate rental income.

ProPublica has not extracted investments data for 2017. For information about Sonia Sotomayor’s investments, view the filing.

Additional Information or Explanations

Additional information or explanations include a justice’s explanatory comments clarifying other portions of the report. These may include explanations of apparent inconsistencies with previous reports, third-party opinions on possible conflicts of interest or other supporting documentation.

Part III - A - Items 1, 2 and 3 - Publisher's advances against royalties for two books. Dates provided are dates of checks forwarded by literary agent in amounts net of agent's commissions,

Part III - A - Item 4 - Donation of $2,000 was made on my behalf to a qualified charitable organization in lieu of an honorarium, pursuant to Section 1020.30(c) of the Judicial Conference Regulations.

Part IV - Item 1 - In conjunction with this event, I participated in a similar event at the Law School of the University of California at Berkeley. The cost of transportation and lodging was shared by the two universities.

Part IV - Item 5 - While the University of Macerata is a public institution, the publication of the Italian language edition of my memoir "My Beloved World" was sponsored by Studio Lucchetti, a private Italian law firm. One of the two panel discussions in which I participated dealt with the publication of the memoir.

Part IV - Item 6 - The cost of transportation, lodging and meals for these events were shared by the sponsoring organizations. Transportation from the United States to Cape Town, South Africa and from Arusha, Tanzania to the United States was paid for by the University of Cape Town, where I had participated in similar events prior to flying to Arusha. The University of Cape Town is a public institution.

Part IV - Item 8 - In conjunction with this event, I participated in a similar event at Queens College, Flushing, New York. The cost of transportation was shared by the two universities. Queens College is a public institution,

About The Data

The bulk of the data we used came from the Free Law Project, which maintains a database of more than 35,000 financial disclosure records for federal judges, justices and magistrates, most of it dating back to 2003. These disclosures, which federal employees are required to file each year under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, are maintained by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. The law, however, requires most of them to be destroyed after six years, making many disclosures from earlier years hard to find. Our disclosures cover most of those filed since 2003, as well as some financial information disclosed by some justices during their Senate confirmations in 1990, 1991 and 2000. (Do you have information about a Supreme Court justice’s finances from before 2003? Email us.)

Because much of the data was extracted from PDFs using optical character recognition, we designed our own database and imported and cleaned the Free Law Project’s data to fix scanning and other errors. We corrected spelling errors, edited fields for style and clarity and, where possible, attempted to add contextual information by, for example, categorizing organizations and transactions, standardizing certain fields, updating entity names or filling in missing information.

In some cases, such as when the Free Law Project did not have a specific disclosure or had not extracted data from a report, we extracted or transcribed the data manually.

After cleaning and standardizing the data, we spot-checked it for accuracy, looking primarily for transcription or categorization errors. If you believe you see an error in the database, please contact us at [email protected].

ProPublica has reported that justices have sometimes failed to disclose speaking engagements and gifts like private jet travel and luxury vacations from wealthy and influential people. Read our series: Friends of the Court.

Do you have any tips on the courts? Contact us securely or reach out to ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott and Josh Kaplan.

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