Sonia Sotomayor

Sonia Maria Sotomayor is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Obama on May 26, 2009 and has served since August 8, 2009. She is the first Hispanic and Latina member of the Court. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother.

About Sonia Sotomayor in brief

Sonia Maria Sotomayor is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009 and has served since August 8, 2009. She is the first Hispanic and Latina member of the Court. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1976 and received her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1979. She worked as an assistant district attorney in New York for four and a half years before entering private practice in 1984. In 1997, she was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, but her nomination was slowed by the Republican majority in the Senate. In May 2009, President Obama nominated her to the Supreme court following the retirement of Justice David Souter. Her nomination was confirmed by the Senate in August 2009 by a vote of 68–31. She has been identified with concern for the rights of defendants, calls for reform of the criminal justice system, and making impassioned dissents on issues of race, gender and ethnic identity, including Schuette v. BAMN, Utah v. Strieff, and Trump v. Hawaii. She self-identifies as a “Nuyorican’” and has taught at the New York University School of Law and Columbia Law School. Her younger brother, Juan Sotomyor, later became a physician and university professor in the Syracuse, New York, area.

She became a Catholic and grew up in Puerto Rican communities in the South Bronx and East Bronx; she self-identified as a “nuyorica” (Puerto Rican-American). She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age seven, and began taking daily insulin injections. Sonia grew up with an alcoholic father and a mother who was emotionally distant; she felt closest to her grandmother, who she later said gave her a source of “protection and purpose’”. She has said that she was first inspired by the book character Nancy Drew, and then by the television series Perry Mason. Despite the distance between the two children, which became greater after her father’s death, Sonia was not fully reconciled with her father for decades until her father’s death. She bought the Encyclopædia Britannica for her education; she bought it for the value of education for her children, something unusual in the housing projects of the 1950s and 1960s. Her relative proximity to Yankee Stadium led to her becoming a lifelong fan of the New New York Yankees. She also became fluent in English, then in English in English and then in Spanish, after her strongwilled, English-willed and English-speaking father died of heart problems at age 42, when he was nine years old. She now lives in New Jersey with her husband and three children, and has a son and daughter-in-law.

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