Sonia Sotomayor (2018)

Associate justice since Aug. 8, 2009

← Back to overview View 2018 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
2018	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
Nov. 5, 2018	Penguin Random House	$10,000.00	Other Book-Related Income
Oct. 8, 2018	Penguin Random House	$10,000.00	Other Book-Related Income
July 16, 2018	Penguin Random House	$500.00	Other Book-Related Income
April 13, 2018	The Diller – von Furstenberg Family Foundation	$2,000.00	Honorarium Donation in lieu of honorarium
Feb. 8, 2018	Penguin Random House	$12,500.00	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
Nov. 13 – 14, 2018	Harvard University	Cambridge, MA	Moot Court Judged moot court competition	Food, Lodging, Transportation
Oct. 18 – 19, 2018	Cornell University	Ithaca, NY	Moot Court Judged moot court competition	Food, Lodging, Transportation
Oct. 6 – 7, 2018	American Academy of Arts and Sciences	Cambridge, MA	Ceremony Induction as a member	Food, Lodging, Transportation
Sept. 13 – 14, 2018	Yale University	New Haven, CT	Seminar Participation in Global Constitutionalism Seminar	Food, Lodging, Transportation
April 2 – 3, 2018	Vanderbilt University	Nashville, TN	Speaking, Teaching Participation in question and answer session with students	Food, Lodging, Transportation
March 5 – 6, 2018	National Association of Student Personnel Administrators	Philadelphia, PA	Speaking, Teaching Participation in question and answer session with conference participants	Lodging
Feb. 6 – 7, 2018	Brown University	Providence, RI	Speaking, Teaching Participation in question and answer session with students	Food, Lodging, Transportation
Feb. 5 – 6, 2018	Emory University	Atlanta, GA	Speaking, Teaching Participation in question and answer session with law school students	Food, Lodging, Transportation
Jan. 22 – 23, 2018	Civic Learning Council	Seattle, WA	Conference/Symposium Participation in Civic Learning Initiative Conference	Food, Lodging, Transportation
Dec. 7, 2018	Duquesne University	Pittsburgh, PA	Ceremony Accepted Carol Mansmann Award for Distinguished Public Service	Food, Transportation
Oct. 5, 2018	Princeton University	Princeton, NJ	Speaking Speech	Transportation
April 6, 2018	New York University	New York, NY	Speaking Conversation with retired South Africa Constitutional Court Judge Albie Sachs	Food, Transportation
March 6, 2018	New York University	New York, NY	Speaking Address at convocation honoring Judge Robert A. Katzmann	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 2018. 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, 3 and 4 - 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, I have been advised by Penguin Random House, LLC, publisher of the two books, Tuming Pages and The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor that it disbursed $20,052 during 2018 to promote the sale of the books. Those disbursements included the payment of expenses to third parties (e.g. transportation and lodging) in support of appearances I made in various locations m the United States. I visited Michigan State University in August, 2018 and State University of New York at Stony Brook in October, 2018, and participated in question and answer events with students at both universities. Both are public institutions. Both universities purchased copies of my memoir, My Beloved World, which were read as part of their freshman orientation programs.

Part III - A - Item 5 - Donation of $2,000 was made on my behalf to a qualified charitable organization in lieu of an honorsrium, pursuant to Section 1020.30(¢) of the Judicial Conference Regulations.

Part IV - Item 1 - In conjunction with this event, I participated in events sponsored by the University of Texas - Sun Antonio and the University of Houston Law School. Both universities are public institutions. The cost of transportation was shared by the sponsor of the event and the two universities.

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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