During her confirmation hearing for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor acknowledged that she, as most of my generation did, had watched TV as a child. She said that one of the shows she watched was Perry Mason and that it inspired her to want to become a prosecutor.
This is a startling revelation. While the rest of us wanted to be lawyers like Perry Mason and defend the innocent, she wanted to be like District Attorney, Hamilton Burger?
Hamilton Burger?
Hamilton Burger is to the legal profession, what the San Diego Padres are to major league baseball. A loser! His very name was the source of an in-joke (Ham Burger). During the course of the nine year run of the TV show and in all of the Earle Stanley Gardner books, Mr. Burger won two cases. And at the very end, those verdicts did not stand. (For those keeping score: The Case of the Terrified Typist and The Case of the Deadly Verdict.)
So, because she chose the loser, Hamilton Burger (superbly played by William Talsman) as her role model, she finished high school, went to Princeton, then Yale, worked as an ADA in Manhattan (Can you say, “Law and Order?” I knew you could.) and then was appointed as a Federal Judge in 1991 by President Bush.
I guess despite what some senators have said, we are the product of our life experiences and the choices we make. Because Sonia Sotomayor, as a child, wanted to be like Hamilton Burger, she will be seated on the Supreme Court by the first Monday in October. I, for one, am pleased by this because it will lead a lot of people to revisit Hamilton Burger’s dedication to the law by reading the novels or viewing the TV episodes here. Despite, the fact that Mr. Burger constantly lost to Perry Mason, he never stopped looking for truth and justice. That appears to be the life lesson that Judge Sotomayor took from this fictional foil. I hope the lesson will continue to serve her well in her new job.