Sonia Maria Sotomayor (born June 25, 1954) is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. On May 26, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace retired Justice David Souter. Her nomination was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 6, 2009, by a vote of 68-31, and she was sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts on August 8. Sotomayor is the Court's 111th justice, its first justice of Latin-American descent, and its third female justice.
Sotomayor is of Puerto Rican descent and was born in the Bronx. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated with an A.B., summa *** laude, from Princeton University in 1976 and received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. She worked as an assistant district attorney in New York for five years before entering private practice in 1984. She played an active role on the boards of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board. Sotomayor was nominated to the U..District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, and her nomination was confirmed in 1992.
Sotomayor has ruled on several high–profile cases. In 1995, she issued a preliminary injunction against Major League Baseball which ended the 1994 baseball strike. Sotomayor made a ruling allowing the Wall Street Journal to publish Vince Foster's final note. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her nomination was slowed by the Republican majority in the Senate, but she was eventually confirmed in 1998. On the Second Circuit, Sotomayor heard appeals in more than 3,000 cases and has written about 380 opinions. Sotomayor has taught at the New York University School of Law and Columbia Law School.
Early Life
Sonia Maria Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, a borough of New York City. Her father, Juan Sotomayor (born 1921), had a third–grade education and did not speak English. He was from the Santurce area of San Juan. Her mother, Celina Báez (born 1927), was from the neighborhood of Santa Rosa in Lajas a still mostly rural area on Puerto Rico's southwest coast. They left Puerto Rico, met, and married during World War II after Celina served in the Women's Army Corps. He worked as a tool–and–die worker and she as a telephone operator and then a practical nurse. Sonia's younger brother, Juan Sotomayor (born c. 1957), is a physician and university professor in the Syracuse, New York, area.
Sotomayor was raised a Catholic and grew up among other Puerto Ricans who settled in the South Bronx and East Bronx; she self–identifies as a "Nuyorican".At first, she lived in a South Bronx tenement. In 1957, the family moved to the well–maintained, racially and ethnically mixed, working–class Bronxdale Houses housing project in Soundview(which has at times been considered part of both the East Bronx and South Bronx). Her relative proximity to Yankee Stadiumled to her becoming a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees.The extended family got together frequently and regularly visited Puerto Rico during summers.
Sonia was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age eight and began taking daily insulin injections. Her father died of heart problems at age 42, when she was nine years old. After this, she became fluent in English.Sotomayor has said that she was first inspired by the strong–willed Nancy Drew book character, and then after her diabetes diagnosis led doctors to suggest a different career from detective, she was inspired to go into a legal career and become a judge by watching the Perry Mason television series.She reflected in 1998: "I was going to college and I was going to become an attorney, and I knew that when I was ten. Ten. That's no jest."
Celina Sotomayor put great stress on the value of education; she bought the Encyclopædia Britannica for her children, something unusual in the housing projects. Sotomayor has credited her mother with being her "life inspiration". For grammar school, Sotomayor attended the parochial Blessed Sacrament School in Soundview, where she was valedictorian and had a near–perfect attendance record. Although underage, Sotomayor worked at a local retail store; she also worked at a hospital. Sotomayor passed the entrance tests for, then commuted to, the academically rigorous parochial Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. Meanwhile, the Bronxdale Houses had fallen victim to increasing heroin use, crime, and the emergence of the Black Spades gang. In 1970, the family found refuge by moving to Co–op City in the Northeast Bronx. At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor was on the forensics team and was elected to the student government. She graduated as valedictorian in 1972.
College and law school
Sotomayor’s 1976 Princeton yearbook photo.
When Sotomayor entered Princeton University on a full scholarship, there were few women students and fewer Latinos (about 20). She knew only of the Bronx and Puerto Rico, and she later described her initial Princeton experience as like "a visitor landing in an alien country."[ She was too intimidated to ask questions for her first year there; her writing and vocabulary skills were weak, and she lacked knowledge in the classics. She put in long hours in the library and over summers, worked with a professor outside class, and gained skills, knowledge, and confidence. She became a moderate student activis] and co–chair of the Acción Puertorriqueña organization, which looked for more opportunities for Puerto Rican students and served a a social and political hub for them.[ She worked in the admissions office, travelling to high schools and lobbying on behalf of her best prospects.] Sotomayor focused in particular on faculty hiring and curriculum; at the time, Princeton did not have a single full–time Latino professor nor any class on Latin America.Sotomayor later addressed the curriculum issue in an opinion piece in the college paper: "Not one permanent course in this university now deals in any notable detail with the Puerto Rican or Chicano cultures." After a visit to university president William G. Bowen in her sophomore year did not produce results, the organization filed a formal letter of cmplaint in April 1974 with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, saying the school discriminated in its hiring and admission practices. Sotomayor told the New York Times at the time that "Princeton is following a policy of benign neutrality and is not making substantive efforts to change," and she wrote opinion pieces for The Daily Princetonian with the same theme. The university began to hire Latino faculty, and Sotomayor established an ongoing dialogue with Bowen.Sotomayor also successfully persuaded historian Peter Winn to create a seminar on Puerto Rican history and politics. Sotomayor joined the governance board of Princeton's Third World Center and served on the university's student–faculty Discipline Committee, which issued rulings on student infractions. She also ran an after–school program for local children and volunteered as an interpreter for Latino patients at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital.
A history major, Sotomayor received almost all A's in her final two years of college. Sotomayor wrote her senior thesis at Princeton on Luis Muñoz Marín, the first democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico, and on the territory's struggles for economic and political self–determination. The 178–page thesis, "La Historia Ciclica de Puerto Rico: The Impact of the Life of Luis Muñoz Marin on the Political and Economic History of Puerto Rico, 1930–1975",won honorable mention for the Latin American Studies Thesis Prize. As a senior, Sotomayor won the Pyne Prize, the top award for undergraduates, which reflected both strong grades and extracurricular activities. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1976 she was awarded an A.B. from Princeton, graduating summa *** laude. Sotomayor has described her time at Princeton as a life–changing experience.
On August 14, 1976, just after graduating from Princeton, Sotomayor married Kevin Edward Noonan, whom she had dated since high school, in a small chapel at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. She used the married name Sonia Sotomayor de Noonan.He became a biologist and a patent lawyer.
In the fall of 1976, Sotomayor entered Yale Law School, again on a scholarship This, too, was a place with very few Latinos.She fit in well and was known as a hard worker, but she was not considered among the top stars of her class.Yale General Counsel and professor José A. Cabranes was an early mentor to her and helped her to understand how she could be successful within "the system". She became an editor of the Yale Law Journal and was also managing editor of the student–run Yale Studies in World Public Order publication, which is now known as the Yale Journal of International Law[ Sotomayor published a law review note on the effect of possible Puerto Rican statehood on the island's mineral and ocean rights.She was a semi–finalist in the Barristers Union mock trial competition. She was co–chair of a group for Latin, Asian, and Native American students, and in her advocacy pushed for hiring more Hispanics for the faculty of the law school. In her third year, she filed a formal complaint against the established Washington, D.C., law firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge for suggesting during a recruiting dinner that she was only at Yale via affirmative action. Sotomayor refused to be interviewed by the firm further and filed her complaint with a faculty–student tribunal, which ruled in her favor. Her action triggered a campus–wide debate, and news of the firm's subsequent December 1978 apology made the Washington Post. In 1979, she was awarded a J.D. from Yale Law School. She was admitted to the New York Bar in 1980.
Early legal career
On the recommendation of Cabranes, Sotomayor was hired out of law school as an assistant district attorney under New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau starting in 1979. She said at the time that she did so with conflicted emotions: "There was a tremendous amount of pressure from my community, from the third–world community, at Yale. They could not understand why I was taking this job. I'm not sure I've ever resolved that problem."It was a time of crisis–level crime rates and drug problems in New York, Morgenthau's staff was overburdened with cases, and like other rookie prosecutors she was initially fearful of appearing before judges in court. Working in the trial division, she handled heavy caseloads as she prosecuted everything from shoplifting and prostitution to robberies, assaults, and murders.She also worked on cases involving police brutality. She was not afraid to venture into tough neighborhoods or endure squalid conditions in order to interview witnesses. In the courtroom, she was effective at cross examination and at simplifying a case in ways that a jury could relate to.She helped convict the "Tarzan Murderer" (who acrobatically entered apartments, robbed them, and shot residents for no reason) in 1983 in her highest–profile case] She felt lower–level crimes were largely products of socioeconomic environment and poverty, but she had a different attitude about serious felonies: "No matter how liberal I am, I'm still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous."[ Hispanic–on–Hispanic crime was of particular concern to her: "The saddest crimes for me were the ones that my own people committed against each other." In general, she showed a passion for bringing law and order to the streets of New York, displaying special zeal in pursuing child pornography cases, unusual for the time. She worked 15–hour days and gained a reputation for being driven and for her preparedness and fairness. One of her job evaluations labelled her a "potential superstar".Morgenthau later described her as "smart, hard–working, [and having] a lot of common sense,"[58] and as a "fearless and effective prosecutor." She stayed a typical length of time in the post and had a common reaction to the job: "After a while, you forget there are decent, law–abiding people in life."
She and Noonan divorced amicably in 1983; they did not have children .She has said that the pressures of her working life were a contributing factor, but not the major factor, in the breakup.
In 1984, she entered private practice, joining the commercial litigation practice group of Pavia & Harcourt in Manhattan as an associate. One of 30 attorneys in the law firm, she specialized in intellectual property litigation, international law, and arbitration. She later said, "I wanted to complete myself as an attorney." Although she had no civil litigation experience, the firm recruited her heavily, and she learned quickly on the job. She was eager to try cases and argue in court, rather than be part of a larger law firm.Her clients were mostly international corporations doing business in the United States;[ much of her time was spent tracking down and suing counterfeiters of Fendi goods. In some cases Sotomayor went on–site with the police to Harlem or Chinatown to have illegitimate merchandise seized, in the latter instance pursuing a fleeing culprit while riding on a motorcycle. She said at the time that Pavia & Harcourt's efforts were run "much like a drug operation", and the successful rounding up of thousands of counterfeit accessories in 1986 was celebrated by "Fendi Crush", a destruction–by–garbage–truck event at Tavern on the Green. At other times she dealt with dry legal issues such as grain export contract disputes.In a 1986 appearance on Good Morning America that profiled women ten years after college graduation, she said that the bulk of law work was drudgery, and that while she was content with her life she had expected greater things of herself coming out of college. In 1988 she became a partner at the firm; she was paid well but not extravagantly.She left in 1992 when she became a judge.
From 1983 to 1986, Sotomayor had an informal solo practice, dubbed Sotomayor & Associates, located in her Brooklyn apartment.She performed legal consulting work, often for friends or family members.
In addition to her law firm work, Sotomayor found visible public service roles. She was not connected to the party bosses that typically picked people for such jobs in New York, and indeed she was registered as an independent. Instead, District Attorney Morgenthau, an influential figure, served as her patron. In 1987, Governor of New York Mario Cuomo appointed Sotomayor to the board of the State of New York Mortgage Agency, which she served on until 1992.As part of one of the largest urban rebuilding efforts in American history, the agency helped low–income people get home mortgages and to provide insurance coverage for housing and AIDS hospices. Despite being the youngest member of a board composed of strong ersonalities, she involved herself in the details of the operation and was effective.She was vocal in supporting the right to affordable housing, directing more funds to lower–income home owners, and in her skepticism about the effects of gentrification, although in the end she voted in favor of most of the projects.
Sotomayor was appointed by Mayor Ed Koch in 1988 as one of the founding members of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, where she served for four years. There she took a vigorous role in the board's implementation of a voluntary scheme wherein local candidates received public matching funds in exchange for limits on contributions and spending and agreeing to greater financial disclosure. Sotomayor showed no patience with candidates who failed to follow regulations and was more of a stickler for making campaigns follow those regulations than some of the other board members.She joined in rulings that fined, audited, or reprimanded the mayoral campaigns of Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudy Giuliani.
Based upon another recommendation from Cabranes, Sotomayor was a member of the board of directors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1980 to 1992. There she was a top policy maker who actively worked with the organization's lawyers on issues such as New York City hiring practices, police brutality, the death penalty, and voting rights. The group achieved its most visible triumph when it successfully blocked a city primary election on the grounds that New York City Council boundaries diminished the power of minority voters.
During 1985 and 1986, Sotomayor served on the board of the Maternity Center Association, a Manhattan–based non–profit group which focused on improving the quality of maternity care.]
Since President Barack Obama's election there had been speculation that Sotomayor could be a leading candidate for a Supreme Court seat if one became available on the court during Obama's term. New York senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand wrote a joint letter to Obama urging him to appoint Sotomayor, or alternatively Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, to the Supreme Court if a vacancy should arise on the Court during his term. The White House first contacted Sotomayor about the possibility of her being nominated on April 27, 2009.On April 30, 2009, Justice David Souter's retirement plans leaked to the media, and Sotomayor received early attention as a possible nominee for the seat to be vacated in June 2009. On May 13, 2009, the Associated Press reported that Obama was considering Sotomayor, among others, for possible appointment to the United States Supreme Court On May 26, 2009, Obama nominated Sotomayor to the court. If confirmed, this would make her the Supreme Court's first Hispanic or Latino justice.However some attention has been given to Justice Benjamin Cardozo, a Sephardic Jew of Portuguese descent – as the first Hispanic on the court when appointed in 1932. However, the term "Hispanic" was not in use as an ethnic identifier at the time, and Portuguese are sometimes excluded from its meaning. Sotomayor would also be the third woman to serve on the Court, following Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her appointment would give the Court a record six Roman Catholic justices serving at the same time.
Sotomayor's nomination won praise from Democrats and liberals, and Democrats appeared to have sufficient votes to confirm her. The strongest criticism of her nomination came from conservatives and some Republican senators regarding a line that she used in some form in a number of her speeches and that became best known for its use in a 2001 Berkeley Law lecture: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Sotomayor had made similar remarks in other speeches between 1994 and 2003, including one she submitted as part of her confirmation questionnaire for the Court of Appeals in 1998, but they had attracted little attention.[182] The rhetoric quickly became inflamed, with radio commentator Rush Limbaugh and former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich calling Sotomayor a "racist" (although the latter later backtracked from that claim),while John Cornyn and other Republican senators denounced such attacks but said that Sotomayor's approach was troubling. Backers of Sotomayor offered a variety of explanations for and defenses of the remark. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stated that Sotomayor's word choice in 2001 had been "poor". Sotomayor subsequently clarified her remark via Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy, saying that while life experience shapes who one is, "ultimately and completely" a judge follows the law regardless of personal background. Of her cases, the Second Circuit rulings in Ricci v. DeStefano received the most attention during the early nomination discussion, and in the rest of her confirmation process the Supreme Court overturned that ruling on June 29. Some of the fervor with which conservatives viewed the Sotomayor nomination was due to the history and grievances of federal judicial nomination battles going back to the 1987 Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination.
A Gallup poll released a week after the nomination showed 54 percent of Americans in favor of Sotomayor's confirmation compared with 28 percent in opposition, similar to public support figures for most past nominees who gained Senate confirmation. On June 8, Sotomayor suffered a small fracture in her ankle while travelling to Washington to meet with senators.A June 12 Fox News poll showed 58 percent of the public disagreeing with her "wise Latina" remark but 67 percent saying the remark should not disqualify her from serving on the Supreme Court. The American Bar Association gave her a unanimous "well qualified" assessment, its highest mark for professional qualification. Following the Ricci overruling, Rasmussen Reports and CNN/Opinion Research polls showed that the public was now sharply divided, largely along partisan and ideological lines, as to whether Sotomayor should be confirmed.
Sotomayor's confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee began on July 13, 2009. During them, she backed away from her "wise Latina" remark, declaring it "a rhetorical flourish that fell flat" and stating that "I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment." When Republican senators confronted her regarding other remarks from her past speeches, she pointed to her judicial record and said she had never let her own life experiences or opinions influence her decisions. Republican senators said that while her rulings to this point might be largely traditional, they feared her Supreme Court rulings – where there is more latitude with respect to precedent and interpretation – might be more reflective of her speeches.Sotomayor defended her position in Ricci as following applicable precedent. When asked whom she admired, she pointed to Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo. In general, Sotomayor followed the hearings formula of recent past nominees by avoiding stating personal positions, declining to take positions on controversial issues likely to come before the court, agreeing with senators from both parties, and repeatedly affirming that as a justice she would just apply the law.On July 28, 2009, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Sotomayor's nomination; the 13–6 vote was almost entirely along party lines, with no Democrats opposing her and only one Republican supporting her.
On August 6, 2009, Sotomayor's appointment was brought up for a vote on the floor of the Senate. She was confirmed by a vote of 68 to 31. All Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them voted in favor of confirmation, with the exception of the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was unavailable to vote due to health issues. Thirty-one Republicans opposed the nomination, and nine supported it.
Sotomayor was sworn in on August 8, 2009, by Chief Justice John Roberts. She will be invested in the court, when it reconvenes, on September 8, 2009, in a special session
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