U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Thursday blamed outside factors, not the justices themselves, for the public perception that the high court has become a political institution.

Speaking at the New York Public Library in Manhattan, Sotomayor said, “The world around us has politicized what we've done.”

The night before her appearance, according to the New York Post, Sotomayor dined at New York's Harry Cipriani restaurant with her former law clerk Amal Clooney and her husband George Clooney, the actor.

At the library, Sotomayor contrasted Justice Antonin Scalia's originalist approach to interpreting statutes and the Constitution to Justice Stephen Breyer's “living Constitution” formulation. They are “judicial approaches,” she said, that serve as guideposts for decision-making and keep their rulings from being arbitrary.

But depending on which result those approaches lead to, she said, the two schools of thought have become fodder for political bickering.

“You will hear politicians on the Republican side say, 'I'm an originalist,' like the voters understand what that means,” she said. “You'll hear Democrats talking about the living Constitution.” In that way, she said, “our approaches get politicized.”

Sotomayor faulted the “failings of our civic teaching,” as well as the public's failure to read court opinions thoroughly. “How many of you have taken the time to read the analysis [in opinions] to determine what analysis we're dealing with?” she asked rhetorically.

Sotomayor also took a swipe at media coverage of the court. “I pick up a newspaper half an hour after we've issued a decision,” she said, “and they're writing about what we've done wrong, and half the time they're saying things we haven't done. They're writing before they've even read the thing. And so that's a dangerous way to assume that the Supreme Court is doing this.”

Sotomayor touched on a range of other topics as she roamed around the library auditorium—a trademark of her public appearances—sometimes leading the moderator, library president Tony Marx, to wonder where she was. He finally beckoned her back to the stage.

The justice spoke of feeling like an “alien landing in a different world” when she started as a freshman at Princeton University. She said all professions need to incorporate public service into their training. “Law schools should force their students to do community service,” she said, telling the audience “how good it feels to do something meaningful.”

Asked how the justices' different backgrounds affect their decision-making, she said her own stint as a federal district court judge has had an impact on rulings.

“Having a district court judge on the [Supreme Court] bench can often soften the writings of my appellate colleagues, and … soften the way they're criticizing the lower courts,” Sotomayor said, adding that she sometimes reminds her fellow justices, “Nobody gets something wrong intentionally.”

Having justices with diverse backgrounds, she said, “gives you the ability to understand what people are saying that others may not.”