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Sonia Sotomayor (2019)

Associate justice since Aug. 8, 2009

← Back to overview View 2019 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
2019 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. 20, 2019 Penguin Random House $10,586.11 Royalties

Book royalties

May 16, 2019 Penguin Random House $10,947.53 Royalties

Book royalties

April 30, 2019 Neighbors Club $2,000.00 Honorarium

Donation in lieu of honorarium

Feb. 8, 2019 Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators $2,000.00 Honorarium

Donation in lieu of honorarium

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.

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Date Source Location Purpose Items Paid or Provided
Oct. 26 – 29, 2019 Penguin Random House Austin, TX Book Event

Participation at Texas Book Festival

Food, Lodging, Transportation
Oct. 25 – 26, 2019 Penguin Random House New Orleans, LA Speaking

Conversation with participants at American Association of Pediatrics Conference

Food, Lodging, Transportation
Oct. 18 – 20, 2019 Yale University New Haven, CT Ceremony, Meetings

Attended unveiling of portrait and met with dean and alumni and law school students

Food, Lodging, Transportation
Oct. 18 – 20, 2019 Yale University New Haven, CT Academic - Other, Ceremony

Attended unveiling of portrait; met with dean, alumni and law school students

Food, Lodging, Transportation
Sept. 13 – 17, 2019 National Women’s Hall of Fame Seneca Falls, NY Ceremony

Attendance at installation as a member

Food, Lodging, Transportation
Sept. 13 – 17, 2019 Penguin Random House Seneca Falls, NY Book Event, Speaking

Participation in book event including Women’s National Hall of Fame

Transportation
Sept. 13 – 17, 2019 Penguin Random House Seneca Falls, NY Book Event

Participation in book event including Women’s National Hall of Fame

Transportation
Sept. 12 – 13, 2019 Tufts University Boston, MA Speaking, Teaching

Participation in question and answer session with students

Food, Lodging, Transportation
Sept. 11 – 12, 2019 Penguin Random House Chicago, IL Book Event

Conversation with students sponsored by Women and Children First bookstore

Food, Lodging, Transportation
Sept. 4 – 9, 2019 Penguin Random House Cincinnati, OH; Los Angeles and Oakland, CA; Portland, OR and Albuquerque, NM Book Event

Participation in various book-related events

Food, Lodging, Transportation
Aug. 31 – Sept. 1, 2019 Penguin Random House Decatur, GA Book Event

Participation in Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival

Food, Lodging, Transportation
Aug. 14 – 17, 2019 Mississippi Book Festival Jackson, MS Book Event

Attended events at MS Book Festival and met with federal judges and law clerks

Food, Lodging, Transportation
July 3 – 19, 2019 New York University Lisbon, Portugal Conference/Symposium

Participation in New York University law leadership conference

Food, Lodging, Transportation
June 17 – 18, 2019 Manhattan District Attorney’s Office New York, NY Speaking

Remarks at birthday celebration for Robert Morgenthau

Food, Transportation
June 8 – 9, 2019 Penguin Random House New York, NY Book Event

Participation in Bronx Book Festival

Transportation
May 30 – 31, 2019 Penguin Random House New York, NY Book Event

Participation in New York Book Expo

Transportation
May 16 – 19, 2019 Manhattan College New York, NY Commencement Speech

Commencement speech

Food, Transportation
Jan. 21 – 24, 2019 Supreme Court Historical Society San Juan and Humacao, PR Speaking

Participation in panel with female judges in Puerto Rico and Q&A with college students

Food, Lodging
Jan. 21 – 24, 2019 Penguin Random House San Juan and Humacao, PR Book Event, Speaking

Participation in book events

Transportation
Oct. 18, 2019 Penguin Random House Meriden, CT Speaking, Teaching

Conversation with students at Maloney High School

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.

Source Description Value
Grateful American Foundation Grateful American Book Prize

Donated to iCivics

$13,000.00

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 2019. 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 and 2 - Donations of $2,000 were made by each organization 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 III - A - Items 3 and 4 - Publisher's royalties for Turning Pages. Dates provided are dates of checks forwarded by literary agent in amounts net of agent's commissions. Penguin Random House, LLC has advised me that it disbursed a total of $6,923.99 to promote the sale of books of mine that it published, in additional to royalties it paid.

Part IV - Item 7 - In conjunction with my participation in the identified event, I extended my stay at my own expense for a private vacation in Portugal.

Part IV - Item 8 - In conjunction with my meeting with public school students, the McMullan Foundation purchased various copies of my books, which were distributed to the students.

Part V - Item - 1 - I was awarded the Grateful American Book Prize by the Grateful American Foundation on October 17, 2019. In lieu of accepting the prize, I directed that the prize be donated by the Foundation to a qualified charitable organization. Attached hereto is a copy of a letter from the foundation confirming that the proceeds had been distributed to the charitable organization.

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].

More from Friends of the Court

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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