When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

I have spent my years since Princeton, while at law school and in my various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of the worlds I inhabit. I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up.

My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

My judicial philosophy is fidelity to the law.

My goal is to make it so that the situation which we see at every election - the same candidates, the same faces... to turn the situation around and completely change it.

These new young politicians have given us the confidence to start dreaming again to believe there is a better politics, and a better future for Italy in general.

We have had a long wait for democracy.

And we know there has been horrendous loss of life and suffering and we know that there is anger. Anyone who came anywhere near the general election in constituencies with a substantial Muslim population knows that.