The New York Times-20080125-Blazing a Trail- and Following Her Own Sense of What-s Right- -Biography-
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Blazing a Trail, and Following Her Own Sense of What's Right; [Biography]
HER chambers in the Surrogate's Court portion of the Supreme Court complex in Brooklyn are neither hushed nor imposing: Homey and aromatic (there is coffee brewing on the snack table) is more like it, with a foldaway bicycle in the corner attesting to this judge's unstuffy approach to her magisterial duties.
So Surrogate's Court Judge Margarita Lopez Torres, whose challenge to the arcane methodology that New York State uses to select candidates for judicial elections was unanimously rejected last week in the United States Supreme Court, bikes to work from her Park Slope abode? Absolutely. She may be a grandmother three times over, but she's no stiff. Her notion of fun? Riding a tandem bike through Europe with her husband, Matthew J. Chachere, a legal services attorney.
Once a week, Judge Lopez Torres, who in 1992 became the first Latina elected to the Civil Court in New York City, steps out at the lunchtime salsa classes at the courthouse. It's her way to ward off the battle of the bulge that is a hazard of spending life on the bench adjudicating the vitriolic squabbles of estate settlements or poring over her own legal challenge, backed by the civic group Common Cause and handled by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, to the state's nontransparent way of selecting candidates for judicial seats.
I am somewhat surprised to find myself in a job where a large part of it is watching over people's estates, she says, because coming from the ghetto in East New York, I didn't even know what an estate was.
As for her fight against the State Board of Elections over her thwarted attempt to become a candidate for the State Supreme Court, Judge Lopez Torres is candid: I wasn't happy when the U.S. Supreme Court took the case, and after sitting through the oral arguments in October, I didn't have the feeling that we were going to win. It was a disappointment, but I'm not a cynical person. Usually judicial elections are under the radar, so if there's one thing my case has accomplished, it's been to open a dialogue on an open secret.
The fancifully funky voice of Stevie Wonder, her and her mother's favorite recording artist, emanates from her computer's sound system; evocative portraits painted by her brother Hipolito Torres, including one of Judge Beatrice M. Judge, the first female Supreme Court justice in Brooklyn, grace the walls.
Judge Lopez Torres, 56, is graceful as a ballerina, with a cascade of brown hair that nearly reaches her waist. Her soulful eyes pool up when the topic is the Supreme Court's overruling of her case, a 2006 federal appeals court decision that declared New York State's judicial nominating system unconstitutional.
And if that seems less than sternly judicial, Judge Lopez Torres does not give a hoot. Shattering stereotypes is her mission, as is defying a system that requires currying favor with party bosses. Three times during her decade as a Civil Court judge in Brooklyn, a job she began with the Democratic Party's blessing, she tried and failed to obtain the party's nod to run for a seat on the State Supreme Court.
This failure was linked, she maintains, to a self-imposed glass ceiling: her refusal to bow to the preferences of party leaders in her hiring of court personnel.
No job has ever been so important to me that I would turn over my principles of what is just and fair and right, she says. I felt I should hire people who meet my criteria.
HER independence was interpreted as defiance; she was perceived as lacking loyalty. The punishment? No support when she ran for re-election: I was told that a minority person could not win a countywide seat, she says. I was also told that I was not a team player. When I became a judge, I took an oath: I am loyal to my oath, not to party leaders.
This repeated thwarting of her professional ambitions is what, in 2004, induced her to become the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the New York State Board of Elections that not only attacked this state's unique method -- via conventions attended by party-approved delegates -- for selecting its judicial nominees but condemned it as smacking of patronage politics. When she ran in 2005 for Surrogate's Court judge (again without the party's support), she survived a primary recount before going on to win the election and the distinction of being the first Latino elected to that court in the state, and Brooklyn's first female surrogate judge.
Judge Lopez Torres was born in Puerto Rico and at age 6 immigrated to New York City with her mother and siblings; her father had arrived first and found work as a busboy.
Education was the way we were going to get out of the ghetto; my mother always taught us that the ghetto wasn't who we were and that just because we didn't have money it didn't mean we had no worth.
She participated in the Upward Bound program and, because of a fascination with the activism of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican rights group, and a television series, The Storefront Lawyers, she decided to attend law school at Rutgers University.
I saw it as a way of being involved in the civil rights movement without fighting against the authorities, she says. Though I am a fighter. The U.S. Supreme Court decision leaves me right back here in Surrogate's Court, but my case is not over. It's not like all the options have been foreclosed. This is too important an issue to let go.
[Illustration]PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY CHESTER HIGGINS JR./THE NEW YORK TIMES)