NEW HAVEN In her third visit to the city in less than a year, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor reflected Monday on snowstorms, surveillance and the strategic thinking of the nation’s highest court.

“We’ve got some talkers on the court,” Sotomayor said at Yale University, where she earned a law degree in 1979. “People who do like talking about cases and engaging.”

Sotomayor said since joining the court in 2009, she’s made a point of getting to know the other justices personally, gaining insight into how their unique life experiences play into their view of society and the law.

She spoke of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s reverence for the First Amendment, of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s love of opera and of Justice Samuel Alito’s prosecutorial work at high levels of government.

She also mentioned that Justice Antonin Scalia, as a military school student, carried his rifle on the New York City subways to go to rifle team events.

“There is strategic thinking by every justice on issues that are important to them,” Sotomayor said. That’s why diversity “in legal and life experience, would be very important in a court like ours,” she added.

Sotomayor made two stops at Yale Monday. The first appearance, at Woolsey Hall, focused on her own life story, growing up in the Bronx in a poor family.

She applied to Ivy League schools only because a friend had gotten into Princeton the year before. She had considered Yale for her undergraduate studies, but Yale students wanted to take her to a protest rally during her visit and that was “too progressive for me,” she said.

So she went to Princeton, and came back to Yale for her law degree.

“Yale was a very different place back then,” she said. “It was dangerous, especially if you were a woman, to walk around the Yale campus.” She also recalled that her first New Haven snowstorm shut the entire city down and she made coffee for people who had to abandon their cars on Whitney Avenue.

In many ways, Sotomayor’s memories tell the story of a woman finding her voice. She taught herself English grammar; she ventured out of her comfort zone to meet people from all socioeconomic backgrounds; she asked questions when she didn’t understand a reference.

That’s something she did even on the Supreme Court, she recalled. In her first year on the court, she would lean over to Justice John Paul Stevens and ask for explanations when necessary.

“I was walking into a continuing conversation,” she said of life on the court. “Now, I’m a part of that continuing conversation.”

Indeed, as a justice, she been a consistent liberal voice. In a case involving using GPS technology to follow alleged drug dealers, she noted such surveillance technology was altering the relationship between citizens and government.

In another case, she was the first justice to use the term “undocumented immigrant,” rather than “illegal alien.”

“To call them illegal aliens seemed and does seem insulting to me,” Sotomayor reiterated in her second appearance Monday, at the Yale Law School.

Yale Law School Dean Robert C. Post said Sotomayor “has helped us all to understand the rule of law” as a force in which “all members of our fractured society can find voice.”

Sotomayor’s other New Haven trips in the past year included a speech at Southern Connecticut State University in October and the Yale commencement in May.

Then and now, she said, she hoped to put a human face on the nuances and complexities of the Supreme Court.

“You put us there, in part, because you have some confidence in our judgement,” she said. “Collectively, we sort of check each other in overturning precedent too quickly.”

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