Rhode Island Corrections Director A.T. Wall first met her in 1979 when they were classmates at Yale Law School. They started chatting in the corridor one day, and he was impressed.

“She was a very intriguing person,” Wall recalled Wednesday. “When you spoke to her, it was clear that she had a very keen mind.”

Besides having the ability to cut to the heart of complex legal issues, she was level-headed and engaging, confident but not smug. “She was always asking questions about other people and their experiences,” Wall said. “She was always interested in what you were doing.”

After law school, she and Wall went to work as trial attorneys in Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office, and they became friends.

But even when they were just acquaintances back in law school, Wall was prepared to make a bold prediction: He told the woman he was dating at the time (who is now his wife) that while he’d met a lot of talented people at Yale Law School, he thought that if any of them was destined to be on the U.S. Supreme Court, it was Sonia Sotomayor.

Wall said his wife — the Rev. Maria DeCarvalho, an Episcopal priest in Providence — reminded him of that prediction the other day when President Obama nominated Sotomayor to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice David H. Souter.

Wall said he wishes he was that good of a prognosticator in other parts of his life. “I wouldn’t say that’s a reflection on my ability to predict, but a reflection on how singularly impressive Sonia has always been,” he said.

Another local perspective on Sotomayor comes from Jared A. Goldstein, a Roger Williams University School of Law professor who co-wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Sotomayor’s most notable environmental ruling.

In that 2007 decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Sotomayor said the Clean Water Act did not permit the EPA to use a cost-benefit analysis in determining the best technology available for minimizing the amount of fish and other aquatic life that gets squashed against intake screens or sucked into cooling systems at power plants. Power companies appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Goldstein wrote a legal brief on behalf of environmental law professors who agreed with Sotomayor and disagreed with former President George W. Bush’s EPA.

“I think she was right that Congress didn’t want the EPA to be balancing the costs of protecting fish against the cost of complying with environmental standards,” Goldstein said. “She recognized that Congress wanted industry to use the best technology they could afford for protecting waters and animal and plant life. They didn’t want the agency to try to figure out whether it would be worth it to protect the fish. Congress just said, ‘Do it.’ ”

But in a 6-to-3 ruling, the Supreme Court reversed Sotomayor with Justice Antonin Scalia saying it was “eminently reasonable to conclude” that the Clean Water Act’s silence on determining the best technology available “is meant to convey nothing more than a refusal to tie the agency’s hands as to whether cost-benefit analysis should be used.”

Goldstein said Sotomayor “was reading the statutes correctly for what they are — strong protections for the environment. She is not going to have some crabbed reading of the statutes that will protect industry if she can.” He said, “I think we have reason to be hopeful and optimistic for having her on the court. Of course, the justice she is replacing, Justice Souter, had very similar attitudes, so it’s trading good for good.”

efitzpat@projo.com