Posted: July 15th, 2009

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
New York Times
July 15, 2009

Ramon J. Jimenez watched Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings on the television in a corner of his law office Tuesday morning.

Their lives were once on parallel tracks, but have long since gone in different directions.

Both are children of working-class Puerto Rican parents. Judge Sotomayor, 55, graduated from Yale Law School in 1979; Mr. Jimenez, 60, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1974. Judge Sotomayor, a Bronx-born federal appeals court judge, is on the verge of becoming the third woman and the first Hispanic judge to sit on the United States Supreme Court; Mr. Jimenez is a Brooklyn-born lawyer whose Bronx office is upstairs from a bar near the corner of East 149th Street and the Grand Concourse.

For more than 30 years, Mr. Jimenez has been a South Bronx litigator and agitator, representing low-income families, injured workers, community groups and others in the poorest Congressional district in the country. Many of the cases he takes on pro bono. In recent years, he has earned about $40,000 a year. . . .

“I feel a pride watching her,” Mr. Jimenez said as he sat at the reception area in his office watching the hearings. “I think we took different directions in life, but I certainly feel a kinship. When you think about how many Puerto Ricans were in Ivy League law schools in the ’70s, you have to feel a kinship.”

Mr. Jimenez keeps his law degree, written in Latin, in a frame near the door of his office, which is decorated with Puerto Rican flags and photos and paintings of Roberto Clemente and Pedro Albizu Campos, the revolutionary, Harvard-educated Puerto Rican nationalist leader. Many of Mr. Jimenez’s clients do not even notice the degree.

Mr. Jimenez did not attend his Harvard graduation. “My best friend was a $9.95 Greyhound bus to New York City,” said Mr. Jimenez . . . . “I just felt so isolated at Harvard and I felt such elitism that I didn’t feel comfortable going or having my parents go.” . . .

“I have women here who work seven days a week, 12 hours a day and get paid $250 a week,” Mr. Jimenez said. “Little people, the working people, come through the door over here, and they remind me of my mother.” . . .

In the early 1980s, Mr. Jimenez was an administrative law judge for the State Workers’ Compensation Board, a position he could have used to advance his career, perhaps to become a state or federal judge. But he disliked the politics and the caseload that came with the job, referring to the 90-case-a-day workload as “fast-food justice” and criticizing the compensation board’s chairman, and he later resigned.

“Sometimes I do have regrets, I have to be very honest,” Mr. Jimenez said. “Sometimes I tell myself: ‘Ramon, you would have been better off if you had stayed at Hostos and you were still a professor. Ramon, you’d be better off if you had stayed with the compensation board, if you had stayed quiet.’ But I just can’t do that.”

Read the rest of this story in the New York Times . . .