Sonia Sotomayor
Encyclopedia
Sonia Maria Sotomayor (ˈsoʊnjə ˌsoʊtoʊmaɪˈjɔr, ˈsonja sotomaˈʝor; born June 25, 1954) is an Associate Justice
of the Supreme Court of the United States
, serving since August 2009. Sotomayor is the Court's 111th justice, its first Hispanic
justice, and its third female justice.
Sotomayor was born in The Bronx
, New York City and is of Puerto Rican
descent. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated with an A.B., summa cum 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 was an advocate for the hiring of Latino faculty at both schools. 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.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
by President
George H. W. Bush
in 1991, and her nomination was confirmed in 1992. 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 wrote about 380 opinions. Sotomayor has taught at the New York University School of Law
and Columbia Law School
.
In May 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
in August 2009 by a vote of 68–31.
, a borough of New York City. Her father was Juan Sotomayor (born c. 1921), from the area of Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico
, and her mother was Celina Báez (born 1927), 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 had a third-grade education, did not speak English, and worked as a tool and die worker
; she worked 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 Stadium led 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 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, 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.
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 activist and co-chair of the Acción Puertorriqueña organization, which looked for more opportunities for Puerto Rican students and served as 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 complaint 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 work, "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. In 1976, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and awarded an A.B. from Princeton, graduating summa cum 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.
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," 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.
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 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.
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 hospice
s. Despite being the youngest member of a board composed of strong personalities, 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.
. Moynihan had an arrangement with his fellow New York senator, Republican Al D'Amato
, whereby he would get to choose roughly one out of every four New York district court seats even though a Republican was in the White House. Moynihan also wanted to fulfill a public promise he had made to get a Hispanic judge appointed for New York. When Moynihan's staff recommended her to him, they said "Have we got a judge for you!" Moynihan identified with her socio-economic and academic background and became convinced she would become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. D'Amato became an enthusiastic backer of Sotomayor, who was seen as politically centrist at the time. Of the impending drop in salary from private practice, Sotomayor said: "I've never wanted to get adjusted to my income because I knew I wanted to go back to public service. And in comparison to what my mother earns and how I was raised, it's not modest at all."
Sotomayor was thus nominated on November 27, 1991, by President George H. W. Bush
to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by John M. Walker, Jr.
Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, led by a friendly Democratic majority, went smoothly for her in June 1992, with her pro bono activities winning praise from Senator Ted Kennedy
and her getting unanimous approval from the committee. Then a Republican senator blocked her nomination and that of three others for a while in retaliation for an unrelated block Democrats had put on another nominee. D'Amato objected strongly; some weeks later, the block was dropped, and Sotomayor was confirmed by unanimous consent
of the full United States Senate
on August 11, 1992, and received her commission the next day.
Sotomayor became the youngest judge in the Southern District and the first Hispanic federal judge in New York State. She became the first Puerto Rican woman to serve as a judge in a U.S. federal court. She was one of seven women among the district's 58 judges. She moved from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
, back to the Bronx in order to live within her district.
study found that in such cases, Sotomayor generally handed out longer sentences than her colleagues, especially when white-collar crime
was involved. Fellow district judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum
was an influence on Sotomayor in adopting a narrow, "just the facts" approach to judicial decision-making.
As a trial judge, she garnered a reputation for being well-prepared in advance of a case and moving cases along a tight schedule. Lawyers before her court viewed her as plain-spoken, intelligent, demanding, and sometimes somewhat unforgiving; one said, "She does not have much patience for people trying to snow her. You can't do it."
, preventing it from unilaterally implementing a new collective bargaining
agreement and using replacement players. Her ruling ended the 1994 baseball strike after 232 days, the day before the new season was scheduled to begin. The Second Circuit upheld Sotomayor's decision and denied the owners' request to stay the ruling. The decision raised her profile, won her the plaudits of baseball fans, and had a lasting effect on the game.
In Dow Jones v. Department of Justice (1995), Sotomayor sided with the Wall Street Journal
in its efforts to obtain and publish a photocopy of the last note left by former Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster
. Sotomayor ruled that the public had "a substantial interest" in viewing the note and enjoined the U.S. Justice Department from blocking its release.
In New York Times Co. v. Tasini
(1997), freelance journalists sued the New York Times Company for copyright infringement for the New York Times' inclusion in an electronic archival database (LexisNexis
) of the work of freelancers it had published. Sotomayor ruled that the publisher had the right to license the freelancer's work. This decision was reversed on appeal, and the Supreme Court upheld the reversal; two dissenters (John Paul Stevens
and Stephen Breyer
) took Sotomayor's position.
In Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group
(also in 1997), Sotomayor ruled that a book of trivia from the television program Seinfeld
infringed on the copyright of the show's producer and did not constitute legal fair use
. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
upheld Sotomayor's ruling.
On June 25, 1997, Sotomayor was nominated by President Bill Clinton
to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which was vacated by J. Daniel Mahoney
. Her nomination was initially expected to have smooth sailing, with the American Bar Association
giving her a "well qualified" professional assessment, but as The New York Times
described, "[it became] embroiled in the sometimes tortured judicial politics of the Senate." Some in the Republican majority believed Clinton was eager to name the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice and that an easy confirmation to the appeals court would put Sotomayor in a better position for a possible Supreme Court nomination (despite there being no vacancy at the time nor any indication the Clinton administration was considering nominating her or any Hispanic), and therefore they decided to slow her confirmation. Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh
weighed in that Sotomayor was an ultraliberal who was on a "rocket ship" to the highest court.
During her September 1997 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee
, Sotomayor parried strong questioning from some Republican members about mandatory sentencing
, gay rights, and her level of respect for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
. After a long wait, she was approved by the committee in March 1998, with only two dissensions. However, in June 1998, the influential Wall Street Journal editorial page opined that the Clinton administration intended to “get her on to the Second Circuit, then elevate her to the Supreme Court as soon as an opening occurs”; the editorial criticized two of her district court rulings and urged further delay of her confirmation. The Republican block continued.
Ranking Democratic committee member Patrick Leahy
objected to Republican use of a secret hold
to slow down the Sotomayor nomination, and Leahy attributed that anonymous tactic to GOP reticence about publicly opposing a female Hispanic nominee. The prior month, Leahy had triggered a procedural delay in the confirmation of fellow Second Circuit nominee Chester J. Straub
—who, although advanced by Clinton and supported by Senator Moynihan, was considered much more acceptable by Republicans—in an unsuccessful effort to force earlier consideration of the Sotomayor confirmation.
During 1998, several Hispanic organizations organized a petition drive in New York State, generating hundreds of signatures from New Yorkers to try to convince New York Republican senator Al D'Amato
to push the Senate leadership to bring Sotomayor's nomination to a vote. D'Amato, a backer of Sotomayor to begin with and additionally concerned about being up for re-election that year, helped move Republican leadership. Her nomination had been pending for over a year when Majority Leader Trent Lott
scheduled the vote. With complete Democratic support, and support from 25 Republican senators including Judiciary chair Orrin Hatch
, Sotomayor was confirmed on October 2, 1998, by a 67–29 vote. She received her commission on October 7. The confirmation experience left Sotomayor somewhat angry; she said shortly afterwards that during the hearings Republicans had assumed her political beliefs based on her being a Latina: "That series of questions, I think, were symbolic of a set of expectations that some people had [that] I must be liberal. It is stereotyping, and stereotyping is perhaps the most insidious of all problems in our society today."
Sotomayor's circuit court rulings led to her being considered a political centrist
by the ABA Journal
and other sources and organizations. Several lawyers, legal experts, and news organizations identified her as someone with liberal
inclinations. In any case, the Second Circuit's caseload typically skewed more toward business and securities law rather than hot-button social or constitutional issues. Sotomayor tended to write narrow rulings that relied on close application of the law rather than import general philosophical viewpoints. A Congressional Research Service
analysis found that Sotomayor's rulings defied easy ideological categorization, but did show an adherence to precedent, an emphasis on the facts of a case, and an avoidance of overstepping the circuit court's judicial role. Unusually, Sotomayor read through all the supporting documents of cases under review; her lengthy rulings explored every aspect of a case and tended to feature leaden, ungainly prose. Some legal experts have said that Sotomayor's attention to detail and re-examination of the facts of a case came close to overstepping the traditional role of appellate judges.
Across some 150 cases involving business and civil law, Sotomayor's rulings were generally unpredictable and not consistently pro-business or anti-business. Sotomayor's influence in the federal judiciary, as measured by the number of citations of her rulings by other judges and in law review articles, increased significantly during the length of her appellate judgeship and was greater than that of some other prominent federal appeals court judges. Two academic studies showed that the percentage of Sotomayor's decisions that overrode policy decisions by elected branches was the same as or lower than that of other circuit judges.
Sotomayor was a member of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts. In October 2001, she presented the annual Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley School of Law; titled "A Latina Judge's Voice"; it was published in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal the following spring. In the speech, she discussed the characteristics of her Latina upbringing and culture and the history of minorities and women ascending to the federal bench. She said the low number of minority women on the federal bench at that time was "shocking". She then discussed at length how her own experiences as a Latina might affect her decisions as a judge. In any case, her background in activism did not necessarily influence her rulings: in a study of 50 racial discrimination cases brought before her panel, 45 were rejected, with Sotomayor never filing a dissent. An expanded study showed that Sotomayor decided 97 cases involving a claim of discrimination and rejected those claims nearly 90 percent of the time. Another examination of Second Circuit split decisions on cases that dealt with race and discrimination showed no clear ideological pattern in Sotomayor's opinions.
In the Court of Appeals seat, Sotomayor gained a reputation for vigorous and blunt behavior toward lawyers appealing before her, sometimes to the point of brusque and curt treatment or testy interruptions. She was known for extensive preparation for oral arguments and for running a "hot bench", where judges ask lawyers plenty of questions. Unprepared lawyers suffered the consequences, but the vigorous questioning was an aid to lawyers seeking to tailor their arguments to the judge's concerns. The 2009 Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which collected anonymous evaluations of judges by lawyers who appear before them, contained a wide range of reactions to Sotomayor. Comments also diverged among lawyers willing to be named. Attorney Sheema Chaudhry said, “She’s brilliant and she’s qualified, but I just feel that she can be very, how do you say, temperamental.” Defense lawyer Gerald B. Lefcourt
said, “She used her questioning to make a point, as opposed to really looking for an answer to a question she did not understand.” In contrast, Second Circuit Judge Richard C. Wesley
said that his interactions with Sotomayor had been “totally antithetical to this perception that has gotten some traction that she is somehow confrontational.” Second Circuit Judge and former teacher Guido Calabresi said his tracking showed that Sotomayor's questioning patterns were no different from other members of the court and added, “Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman. [The criticism] was sexist, plain and simple.”
Sotomayor's law clerk
s regarded her as a valuable and strong mentor, and she said that she viewed them like family.
In 2005, Senate Democrats suggested Sotomayor, among others, to President George W. Bush
as an acceptable nominee to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
.
In the 2002 decision Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush
, Sotomayor upheld the Bush administration
's implementation of the Mexico City Policy
, which states that "the United States will no longer contribute to separate nongovernmental organizations which perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations." Sotomayor held that the policy did not constitute a violation of equal protection
, as "the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds."
First Amendment rights
In Pappas v. Giuliani
(2002), Sotomayor dissented from her colleagues’ ruling that the New York Police Department could terminate an employee from his desk job who sent racist materials through the mail. Sotomayor argued that the First Amendment
protected speech by the employee “away from the office, on [his] own time,” even if that speech was "offensive, hateful, and insulting," and that therefore the employee's First Amendment claim should have gone to trial rather than being dismissed on summary judgment.
In 2005, Judge Sotomayor wrote the opinion for United States v. Quattrone. Frank Quattrone had been on trial on charges of obstructing investigations related to technology IPOs. Some members of the media had wanted to publish the names of the jurors deciding Quattrone's case, and a district court had issued an order to forbid the publication of the juror's names. In United States v. Quattrone, Judge Sotomayor wrote the opinion for the Second Circuit panel striking down this order on First Amendment grounds, stating that the media should be free to publish the names of the jurors. The first trial ended in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial, and the district court ordered the media not to publish the names of jurors, even though those names had been disclosed in open court. Judge Sotomayor held that although it was important to protect the fairness of the retrial, the district court's order was an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech and violated the right of the press to "to report freely on events that transpire in an open courtroom."
In 2008, Sotomayor was on a three-judge panel in Doninger v. Niehoff
that unanimously affirmed, in an opinion written by Second Circuit Judge Debra Livingston, the district court's judgment that Lewis S. Mills High School
did not violate the First Amendment rights of a student when it barred her from running for student government after she called the superintendent and other school officials "douchebags" in a blog post written while off-campus that encouraged students to call an administrator and "piss her off more". Judge Livingston held that the district judge did not abuse her discretion in holding that the student's speech "foreseeably create[d] a risk of substantial disruption within the school environment", which is the precedent in the Second Circuit for when schools may regulate off-campus speech. Although Sotomayor did not write this opinion, she has been criticized by some who disagree with it.
Second Amendment rights
Sotomayor was part of the three-judge Second Circuit panel that affirmed the district court's ruling in Maloney v. Cuomo (2009). Maloney was arrested for possession of nunchaku
, which are illegal in New York; Maloney argued that this law violated his Second Amendment
right to bear arms. The Second Circuit's per curiam opinion noted that the Supreme Court has not, so far, ever held that the Second Amendment is binding against state governments. On the contrary, in Presser v. Illinois
, a Supreme Court case from 1886, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment "is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state." With respect to the Presser v. Illinois precedent, the panel stated that only the Supreme Court has "the prerogative of overruling its own decisions," and the recent Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v. Heller
(which struck down the district's gun ban as unconstitutional) did "not invalidate this longstanding principle." The panel upheld the lower court's decision dismissing Maloney's challenge to New York's law against possession of nunchaku. On June 2, 2009, a Seventh Circuit
panel, including the prominent and heavily cited judges Richard Posner
and Frank Easterbrook, unanimously agreed with Maloney v. Cuomo, citing the case in their decision turning back a challenge to Chicago
's gun laws and noting the Supreme Court precedents remain in force until altered by the Supreme Court itself.
Fourth Amendment rights
In N.G. & S.G. ex rel. S.C. v. Connecticut (2004), Sotomayor dissented from her colleagues’ decision to uphold a series of strip searches of “troubled adolescent girls” in juvenile detention centers. While Sotomayor agreed that some of the strip searches at issue in the case were lawful, she would have held that due to “the severely intrusive nature of strip searches,” they should not be allowed “in the absence of individualized suspicion, of adolescents who have never been charged with a crime.” She argued that an "individualized suspicion" rule was more consistent with Second Circuit precedent than the majority's rule.
In Leventhal v. Knapek (2001), Sotomayor rejected a Fourth Amendment
challenge by a U.S. Department of Transportation employee whose employer searched his office computer. She held that, “Even though [the employee] had some expectation of privacy in the contents of his office computer, the investigatory searches by the DOT did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights” because here “there were reasonable grounds to believe” that the search would reveal evidence of “work-related misconduct.”
Alcohol in commerce
In 2004, Sotomayor was part of the judge panel that ruled in Swedenburg v. Kelly
that New York's law prohibiting out-of-state wineries from shipping directly to consumers in New York was constitutional even though in-state wineries were allowed to. The case, which invoked the 21st Amendment
, was appealed and attached to another case. The case reached the Supreme Court later on as Swedenburg v. Kelly and was overruled in a 5–4 decision that found the law was discriminatory and unconstitutional.
Employment discrimination
Sotomayor was involved in the high-profile case Ricci v. DeStefano
that initially upheld the right of the City of New Haven
to throw out its test for firefighters and start over with a new test, because the City believed the test had a "disparate impact" on minority firefighters. (No black firefighters qualified for promotion under the test, whereas some had qualified under tests used in previous years.) The City was concerned that minority firefighters might sue under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
. The City chose not to certify the test results and a lower court had previously upheld the City's right to do this. Several white firefighters and one Hispanic firefighter who had passed the test, including the lead plaintiff who has dyslexia and had put much extra effort into studying, sued the City of New Haven, claiming that their rights were violated. A Second Circuit panel that included Sotomayor first issued a brief, unsigned summary order
(not written by Sotomayor) affirming the lower court's ruling. Sotomayor's former mentor José A. Cabranes
, by now a fellow judge on the court, objected to this handling and requested that the court hear it en banc
. Sotomayor voted with a 7–6 majority not to rehear it and a slightly expanded ruling was issued, but a strong dissent by Cabranes led to the case reaching the Supreme Court in 2009. There it was overruled in a 5–4 decision that found the white firefighters had been victims of racial discrimination when they were denied promotion.
Business
In Clarett v. National Football League (2004), Sotomayor upheld the National Football League
's eligibility rules requiring players to wait three full seasons after high school graduation before entering the NFL draft. Maurice Clarett
challenged these rules, which were part of the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and its players, on antitrust grounds. Sotomayor held that Clarett's claim would upset the established "federal labor law favoring and governing the collective bargaining process."
In Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Dabit
(2005), Sotomayor wrote a unanimous opinion that the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act of 1998 did not preempt class action
claims in state courts by stockbrokers alleging misleading inducement to buy or sell stocks. The Supreme Court handed down an 8–0 decision stating that the Act did preempt such claims, thereby overruling Sotomayor's decision.
In Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp.
(2001), she ruled that the license agreement of Netscape's Smart Download software did not constitute a binding contract because the system didn't give "sufficient notice" to the user.
Civil rights
In Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko (2000), Sotomayor, writing for the court, supported the right of an individual to sue a private corporation working on behalf of the federal government for alleged violations of that individual's constitutional rights. Reversing a lower court decision, Sotomayor found that an existing Supreme Court doctrine, known as "Bivens"—which allows suits against individuals working for the federal government for constitutional rights violations—could be applied to the case of a former prisoner seeking to sue the private company operating the federal halfway house facility in which he resided. The Supreme Court reversed Sotomayor's ruling in a 5–4 decision, saying that the Bivens doctrine could not be expanded to cover private entities working on behalf of the federal government. Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer dissented, siding with Sotomayor's original ruling.
In Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education (1999), the parents of a black student alleged that he had been harassed due to his race and had been discriminated against when he was transferred from a first grade class to a kindergarten class without parental consent, while similarly situated white students were treated differently. Sotomayor agreed with the dismissal of the harassment claims due to lack of evidence, but would have allowed the discrimination claim to go forward. She wrote in dissent that the grade transfer was "contrary to the school's established policies" as well as its treatment of white students, which "supports the inference that race discrimination played a role".
Property rights
In Krimstock v. Kelly (2002), Sotomayor wrote an opinion halting New York City's practice of seizing the motor vehicles of drivers accused of driving while intoxicated and some other crimes and holding those vehicles for "months or even years" during criminal proceedings. Noting the importance of cars to many individuals' livelihoods or daily activities, she held that it violated individuals' due process rights to hold the vehicles without permitting the owners to challenge the City's continued possession of their property.
In Brody v. Village of Port Chester (2003 and 2005), a takings case, Sotomayor first ruled in 2003 for a unanimous panel that a property owner in Port Chester, New York
was permitted to challenge the state’s Eminent Domain Procedure Law. A district court subsequently rejected the plaintiff's claims and upon appeal the case found itself again with the Second Circuit. In 2005, Sotomayor ruled with a panel majority that the property owner's due process rights had been violated by lack of adequate notice to him of his right to challenge a village order that his land should be used for a redevelopment project. However, the panel supported the village's taking of the property for public use.
In Didden v. Village of Port Chester (2006), an unrelated case brought about by the same town's actions, Sotomayor joined a unanimous panel's summary order to uphold a trial court's dismissal – due to a statute of limitations lapse – of a property owner's objection to his land being condemned for a redevelopment project. The ruling further said that even without the lapse, the owner's petition would be denied due to application of the Supreme Court's recent Kelo v. City of New London
ruling. The Second Circuit's reasoning drew criticism from libertarian
commentators.
Since President Barack Obama
's election there had been speculation that Sotomayor could be a leading candidate for a Supreme Court seat. 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 during his term. The White House first contacted Sotomayor on April 27, 2009, about the possibility of her nomination. On April 30, 2009, Justice David Souter
's retirement plans leaked to the media, and Sotomayor received early attention as a possible nominee for Souter's seat to be vacated in June 2009. On May 25, Obama informed Sotomayor of his choice; she later said, "I had my [hand] over my chest, trying to calm my beating heart, literally." On May 26, 2009, Obama nominated her. She became only the second jurist to be nominated to three different judicial positions by three different presidents.
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 she had used in some form in a number of her speeches, particularly 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. 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 in defense of the remark, and White House Press Secretary
Robert Gibbs
stated that Sotomayor's word choice in 2001 had been "poor". Sotomayor subsequently clarified her remark through 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 midst of her confirmation process the Supreme Court overturned that ruling on June 29. Some of the fervor with which conservatives and Republicans viewed the Sotomayor nomination was due to their grievances over the history 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. 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 which 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 was confirmed by the full Senate by a vote of 68–31. The vote was largely along party lines, with no Democrats opposing her and nine Republicans supporting her. (A year later, Obama's second court pick, Elena Kagan
, won confirmation by a 63–37 vote.)
President Obama commissioned Sotomayor on the day of her confirmation; Sotomayor was sworn in on August 8, 2009, by Chief Justice John Roberts
. Sotomayor is the first Hispanic
to serve on the Supreme Court. (Some attention has been given to Justice Benjamin Cardozo – a Sephardic Jew believed to be of distant Portuguese
descent – as the first Hispanic on the court when appointed in 1932, but his roots were uncertain, the term "Hispanic" was not in use as an ethnic identifier at the time, and the Portuguese are generally excluded from its meaning.) Sotomayor is also the third woman to serve on the Court, following Sandra Day O'Connor
and Ruth Bader Ginsburg
. Her appointment gives the Court a record six Roman Catholic justices serving at the same time.
in a September 8 ceremony. Sotomayor heard arguments in her first case on September 9 during a special session. The case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
, involved the First Amendment
rights of corporations in campaign finance and became one of the most controversial and consequential decisions in a number of years, and one in which Sotomayor dissented. Her first major written opinion was a dissent in the Berghuis v. Thompkins
case dealing with Miranda rights.
As her first year neared completion, Sotomayor said it had been exciting, challenging and a little scary; she told friends she felt swamped by the intensity and heavy workload of the job. In succeeding Justice Souter, Sotomayor had done little to change the philosophical balance of the Court, as she was a reliable member of the liberal bloc when the justices divided along the commonly perceived ideological lines. Sotomayor voted with Justices Ginsburg and Breyer 90 percent of the time, one of the highest agreement rates on the Court.
Sotomayor was an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law
from 1998 to 2007. There she taught trial and appellate advocacy as well as a federal appellate court seminar. She has been a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School
since 1999, a paying, adjunct faculty position. There she created and has co-taught a class called the Federal Appellate Externship every semester since 2000; it combines classroom, moot court, and Second Circuit chambers work. She became a member of the Board of Trustees of Princeton University
in 2006, concluding her term in 2011. In 2008, Sotomayor became a member of the Belizean Grove
, an invitation-only women's group modeled after the men's Bohemian Grove
. On June 19, 2009, Sotomayor resigned from the Belizean Grove after Republican politicians voiced concerns over the group's membership policy.
Sotomayor has maintained a public presence since joining the federal judiciary. She has given over 180 speeches since 1993, about half of which either focused on issues of ethnicity or gender or were delivered to minority or women's groups. Her speeches have tended to give a more defined picture of her worldview than her rulings on the bench. The themes of her speeches have often focused on ethnic identity and experience, the need for diversity, and America's struggle with the implications of its diverse makeup. She has also presented her career achievements as an example of the success of affirmative action
policies in university admissions, saying "I am the perfect affirmative action baby" in regard to her belief that her admission test scores were not comparable to those of her classmates.
Sotomayor lives in Greenwich Village
in New York City and has few financial assets other than her home. She enjoys shopping and travelling and giving gifts, and helps support her mother and her mother's husband in Florida. Regarding her short financial disclosure reports, she has said, "When you don't have money, it's easy. There isn't anything there to report." As a federal judge, she is entitled to a pension equal to her full salary upon retirement.
She continues to take daily insulin injections, but her diabetes is considered to be well controlled. Sotomayor does not belong to a Catholic parish
or attend Mass
, but does attend church for important occasions.
She maintains ties with Puerto Rico, visiting once or twice a year, speaking there occasionally, and visiting cousins and other relatives who still live in the Mayagüez area
. She has long stressed her ethnic identity, saying in 1996, "Although I am an American, love my country and could achieve its opportunity of succeeding at anything I worked for, I also have a Latina soul and heart, with the magic that carries."
Sotomayor said of the years following her divorce, that "I have found it difficult to maintain a relationship while I've pursued my career." She has talked of herself as "emotionally withdrawn" and lacking "genuine happiness" when living by herself; after becoming a judge, she said she would not date lawyers. In 1997, she was engaged to New York construction contractor Peter White, but the relationship had ended by 2000.
In July 2010, Sotomayor signed a contract with Alfred A. Knopf
to publish a memoir about the early part of her life. She is receiving an advance of nearly $1.2 million for the work.
(1999), Princeton University
(2001), Brooklyn Law School
(2001), Pace University School of Law
(2003), Hofstra University
(2006), Northeastern University School of Law
(2007), Howard University
(2010), and St. Lawrence University
(2010).
She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society
in 2002. She was given the Outstanding Latino Professional Award in 2006 by the Latino/a Law Students Association.
In June 2010, the Bronxdale Houses development, where Sotomayor grew up, was renamed after her. The Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses and Justice Sonia Sotomayor Community Center comprise 28 buildings with some 3,500 residents. While many New York housing developments are named after well-known people, this was only the second to be named after a former resident.
Forewords
Speeches
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Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States are the members of the Supreme Court of the United States other than the Chief Justice of the United States...
of the Supreme Court of the United States
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
, serving since August 2009. Sotomayor is the Court's 111th justice, its first Hispanic
Hispanic and Latino Americans
Hispanic or Latino Americans are Americans with origins in the Hispanic countries of Latin America or in Spain, and in general all persons in the United States who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino.1990 Census of Population and Housing: A self-designated classification for people whose origins...
justice, and its third female justice.
Sotomayor was born in The Bronx
The Bronx
The Bronx is the northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City. It is also known as Bronx County, the last of the 62 counties of New York State to be incorporated...
, New York City and is of Puerto Rican
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
descent. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated with an A.B., summa cum laude, from Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
in 1976 and received her J.D.
Juris Doctor
Juris Doctor is a professional doctorate and first professional graduate degree in law.The degree was first awarded by Harvard University in the United States in the late 19th century and was created as a modern version of the old European doctor of law degree Juris Doctor (see etymology and...
from Yale Law School
Yale Law School
Yale Law School, or YLS, is the law school of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Established in 1824, it offers the J.D., LL.M., J.S.D. and M.S.L. degrees in law. It also hosts visiting scholars, visiting researchers and a number of legal research centers...
in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal
Yale Law Journal
The Yale Law Journal is a student-run law review affiliated with the Yale Law School. Published continuously since 1891, it is the most widely known of the eight law reviews published by students at Yale Law School...
. She was an advocate for the hiring of Latino faculty at both schools. 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
LatinoJustice PRLDEF
LatinoJustice PRLDEF, long known by its former name the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, is a New York-based national civil rights organization with the goal of changing discriminatory practices via advocacy and litigation...
, the State of New York Mortgage Agency
State of New York Mortgage Agency
The State of New York Mortgage Agency is a public authority created in 1970 by the state government of New York to provide affordable homeownership to low- and moderate-income New Yorkers. It offers affordably priced fixed-rate mortgages through several mortgage programs for eligible homebuyers...
, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board
New York City Campaign Finance Board
The New York City Campaign Finance Board is an independent, nonpartisan agency of the City of New York. It was created in 1988 in the wake of several political corruption scandals. It gives public matching funds to qualifying candidates, who in exchange submit to strict contribution and spending...
.
Sotomayor was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York is a federal district court. Appeals from the Southern District of New York are taken to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (in case...
by President
President of the United States
The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....
George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 41st President of the United States . He had previously served as the 43rd Vice President of the United States , a congressman, an ambassador, and Director of Central Intelligence.Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, to...
in 1991, and her nomination was confirmed in 1992. In 1995, she issued a preliminary injunction
Preliminary injunction
A preliminary injunction, in equity, is an injunction entered by a court prior to a final determination of the merits of a legal case, in order to restrain a party from going forward with a course of conduct or compelling a party to continue with a course of conduct until the case has been decided...
against Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
which ended the 1994 baseball strike. Sotomayor made a ruling allowing the Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
to publish Vince Foster
Vince Foster
Vincent Walker Foster, Jr. was a Deputy White House Counsel during the first few months of President Bill Clinton's administration, and also a law partner and friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton...
's final note. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her nomination was slowed by the Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
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 wrote about 380 opinions. Sotomayor has taught at the New York University School of Law
New York University School of Law
The New York University School of Law is the law school of New York University. Established in 1835, the school offers the J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. degrees in law, and is located in Greenwich Village, in the New York City borough of Manhattan....
and Columbia Law School
Columbia Law School
Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, is one of the oldest and most prestigious law schools in the United States. A member of the Ivy League, Columbia Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Columbia University in New York City. It offers the J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. degrees in...
.
In May 2009, President Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
nominated
Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination
On May 26, 2009, President Barack Obama announced his selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, to replace retiring Justice David Souter. Sotomayor's nomination was formally submitted to the United States Senate on June 1, 2009, when the...
Sotomayor for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
to replace retired Justice David Souter
David Souter
David Hackett Souter is a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served from 1990 until his retirement on June 29, 2009. Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat vacated by William J...
. Her nomination was confirmed by the United States Senate
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
in August 2009 by a vote of 68–31.
Early life
Sonia Maria Sotomayor was born in the BronxThe Bronx
The Bronx is the northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City. It is also known as Bronx County, the last of the 62 counties of New York State to be incorporated...
, a borough of New York City. Her father was Juan Sotomayor (born c. 1921), from the area of Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Santurce is a district of San Juan, Puerto Rico.-Summary:Santurce is one of the top ten most populated areas of the island holding Miramar, Loíza, Isla Grande, Barrio Obrero, and Condado as main cultural hot spots for art, music, cuisine, fashion, hotels, technology, multimedia, film, textile and...
, and her mother was Celina Báez (born 1927), from the neighborhood of Santa Rosa in Lajas
Lajas, Puerto Rico
Lajas is a municipality of Puerto Rico located in southwestern region, south of San Germán and Sabana Grande; east of Cabo Rojo; and west of Guánica. Lajas is spread over 11 wards and Lajas Pueblo...
, 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 had a third-grade education, did not speak English, and worked as a tool and die worker
Tool and die maker
Tool and die makers are workers in the manufacturing industry who make jigs, fixtures, dies, molds, machine tools, cutting tools , gauges, and other tools used in manufacturing processes...
; she worked as a telephone operator
Telephone operator
A telephone operator is either* a person who provides assistance to a telephone caller, usually in the placing of operator assisted telephone calls such as calls from a pay phone, collect calls , calls which are billed to a credit card, station-to-station and person-to-person calls, and certain...
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
Syracuse, New York
Syracuse is a city in and the county seat of Onondaga County, New York, United States, the largest U.S. city with the name "Syracuse", and the fifth most populous city in the state. At the 2010 census, the city population was 145,170, and its metropolitan area had a population of 742,603...
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
Nuyorican
Nuyorican is a portmanteau of the terms "New York" and "Puerto Rican" and refers to the members or culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora located in or around New York State especially the New York City metropolitan area, or of their descendants...
". 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
Public housing in the United States
Public housing in the United States has been administered by federal, state and local agencies to provide subsidized assistance for low-income and people living in poverty. Now increasingly provided in a variety of settings and formats, originally public housing in the U.S...
in Soundview
Soundview, Bronx
Soundview is primarily a residential neighborhood geographically located in the South Central section of the Borough of The Bronx in New York City. The neighborhood is part of Bronx Community Board 9...
(which has at times been considered part of both the East Bronx and South Bronx). Her relative proximity to Yankee Stadium led to her becoming a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees
New York Yankees
The New York Yankees are a professional baseball team based in the The Bronx, New York. They compete in Major League Baseball in the American League's East Division...
. 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
Insulin
Insulin is a hormone central to regulating carbohydrate and fat metabolism in the body. Insulin causes cells in the liver, muscle, and fat tissue to take up glucose from the blood, storing it as glycogen in the liver and muscle....
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
Nancy Drew
Nancy Drew is a fictional young amateur detective in various mystery series for all ages. She was created by Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate book packaging firm. The character first appeared in 1930. The books have been ghostwritten by a number of authors and are published...
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
Perry Mason (TV series)
Perry Mason is an American legal drama produced by Paisano Productions that ran from September 1957 to May 1966 on CBS. The title character, portrayed by Raymond Burr, is a fictional Los Angeles defense attorney who originally appeared in detective fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner...
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
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
for her children, something unusual in the housing projects. Sotomayor has credited her mother with being her "life inspiration". For grammar school, Sotomayor attended Blessed Sacrament School in Soundview
Soundview, Bronx
Soundview is primarily a residential neighborhood geographically located in the South Central section of the Borough of The Bronx in New York City. The neighborhood is part of Bronx Community Board 9...
, where she was valedictorian
Valedictorian
Valedictorian is an academic title conferred upon the student who delivers the closing or farewell statement at a graduation ceremony. Usually, the valedictorian is the highest ranked student among those graduating from an educational institution...
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, Cardinal Spellman High School
Cardinal Spellman High School (New York City)
Cardinal Spellman High School is a Catholic diocesan high school located in the New York City borough of the Bronx. It is named after Cardinal Francis Spellman, the sixth archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York....
in the Bronx. Meanwhile, the Bronxdale Houses had fallen victim to increasing heroin use, crime, and the emergence of the Black Spades
Black Spades
The Black Spades were a violent African American street gang in New York City during the 1970s.-History:The gang originated in 1968 in the Bronxdale Houses in the Soundview section of the Bronx as the Savage Seven and began terrorizing the neighborhood. As the gang grew, they became the Black Spades...
gang. In 1970, the family found refuge by moving to Co-op City
Co-op City, Bronx
Co-op City , located in the Baychester section of the Borough of the Bronx in northeast New York City, is one of the largest cooperative housing developments in the world. Situated at the intersection of Interstate 95 and the Hutchinson River Parkway, the community is part of Bronx Community Board 10...
in the Northeast Bronx. At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor was on the forensics team and was elected to the student government. She graduated as valedictorian
Valedictorian
Valedictorian is an academic title conferred upon the student who delivers the closing or farewell statement at a graduation ceremony. Usually, the valedictorian is the highest ranked student among those graduating from an educational institution...
in 1972.
College and law school
When Sotomayor entered Princeton UniversityPrinceton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
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
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
. 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 activist and co-chair of the Acción Puertorriqueña organization, which looked for more opportunities for Puerto Rican students and served as 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
William G. Bowen
William G. Bowen is President Emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation where he served as President from 1988 to 2006. He was the president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988....
in her sophomore year did not produce results, the organization filed a formal letter of complaint 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
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
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
Peter Winn
Peter Winn is a professor of history at Tufts University specialising in Latin America. He has written several books, including Americas, which he developed while serving as academic director for the 1993 PBS series of the same name....
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.
Luis Muñoz Marín
Don José Luis Alberto Muñoz Marín was a Puerto Rican poet, journalist, and politician. Regarded as the "father of modern Puerto Rico," he was the first democratically elected Governor of Puerto Rico. Muñoz Marín was the son of Luis Muñoz Rivera, a renowned autonomist leader...
, the first democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico
Governor of Puerto Rico
The Governor of Puerto Rico is the Head of Government of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Since 1948, the Governor has been elected by the people of Puerto Rico...
, and on the territory's struggles for economic and political self-determination. The 178-page work, "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. In 1976, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and awarded an A.B. from Princeton, graduating summa cum 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
St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York
The Cathedral of St. Patrick is a decorated Neo-Gothic-style Roman Catholic cathedral church in the United States...
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
Yale Law School
Yale Law School, or YLS, is the law school of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Established in 1824, it offers the J.D., LL.M., J.S.D. and M.S.L. degrees in law. It also hosts visiting scholars, visiting researchers and a number of legal research centers...
, 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
José A. Cabranes
José Alberto Cabranes , is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Formerly a practicing lawyer, government official, and law teacher, he was the first Puerto Rican appointed to a federal judgeship in the continental United States .-Background:Cabranes was born in...
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
Yale Law Journal
The Yale Law Journal is a student-run law review affiliated with the Yale Law School. Published continuously since 1891, it is the most widely known of the eight law reviews published by students at Yale Law School...
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
Yale Journal of International Law
The Yale Journal of International Law is a student-edited international law review at the Yale Law School . The journal publishes articles, essays, notes, and commentary that cover a wide range of topics in international and comparative law.-History:The Yale Journal of International Law is the...
. 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
Affirmative action in the United States
In the United States, affirmative action refers to equal opportunity employment measures that Federal contractors and subcontractors are legally required to adopt. These measures are intended to prevent discrimination against employees or applicants for employment, on the basis of "color,...
. 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
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
. In 1979, she was awarded a J.D.
Juris Doctor
Juris Doctor is a professional doctorate and first professional graduate degree in law.The degree was first awarded by Harvard University in the United States in the late 19th century and was created as a modern version of the old European doctor of law degree Juris Doctor (see etymology and...
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 shopliftingShoplifting
Shoplifting is theft of goods from a retail establishment. It is one of the most common property crimes dealt with by police and courts....
and prostitution to robberies
Robbery
Robbery is the crime of taking or attempting to take something of value by force or threat of force or by putting the victim in fear. At common law, robbery is defined as taking the property of another, with the intent to permanently deprive the person of that property, by means of force or fear....
, assaults, and murders. She also worked on cases involving police brutality
Police brutality
Police brutality is the intentional use of excessive force, usually physical, but potentially also in the form of verbal attacks and psychological intimidation, by a police officer....
. 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
Child pornography
Child pornography refers to images or films and, in some cases, writings depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child...
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," 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.
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 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
International law
Public international law concerns the structure and conduct of sovereign states; analogous entities, such as the Holy See; and intergovernmental organizations. To a lesser degree, international law also may affect multinational corporations and individuals, an impact increasingly evolving beyond...
, and arbitration
Arbitration
Arbitration, a form of alternative dispute resolution , is a legal technique for the resolution of disputes outside the courts, where the parties to a dispute refer it to one or more persons , by whose decision they agree to be bound...
. 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
Fendi
Fendi is an Italian high fashion house best known for its "baguette" handbags. It was launched in 1925 as a fur and leather shop in Rome, but today is a multinational luxury goods brand owned by LVMH...
goods. In some cases Sotomayor went on-site with the police to Harlem
Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...
or Chinatown
Chinatown
A Chinatown is an ethnic enclave of overseas Chinese people, although it is often generalized to include various Southeast Asian people. Chinatowns exist throughout the world, including East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Americas, Australasia, and Europe. Binondo's Chinatown located in Manila,...
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
Tavern on the Green
Tavern on the Green was a privately owned American cuisine restaurant located in Central Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City. It remained in operation from 1934 to 2009 under various owners...
. At other times she dealt with dry legal issues such as grain export contract disputes. In a 1986 appearance on Good Morning America
Good Morning America
Good Morning America is an American morning news and talk show that is broadcast on the ABC television network; it debuted on November 3, 1975. The weekday program airs for two hours; a third hour aired between 2007 and 2008 exclusively on ABC News Now...
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.
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
Independent (voter)
An independent voter, those who register as an unaffiliated voter in the United States, is a voter of a democratic country who does not align him- or herself with a political party...
. Instead, District Attorney Morgenthau, an influential figure, served as her patron. In 1987, Governor of New York
Governor of New York
The Governor of the State of New York is the chief executive of the State of New York. The governor is the head of the executive branch of New York's state government and the commander-in-chief of the state's military and naval forces. The officeholder is afforded the courtesy title of His/Her...
Mario Cuomo
Mario Cuomo
Mario Matthew Cuomo served as the 52nd Governor of New York from 1983 to 1994, and is the father of Andrew Cuomo, the current governor of New York.-Early life:...
appointed Sotomayor to the board of the State of New York Mortgage Agency
State of New York Mortgage Agency
The State of New York Mortgage Agency is a public authority created in 1970 by the state government of New York to provide affordable homeownership to low- and moderate-income New Yorkers. It offers affordably priced fixed-rate mortgages through several mortgage programs for eligible homebuyers...
, 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 hospice
Hospice
Hospice is a type of care and a philosophy of care which focuses on the palliation of a terminally ill patient's symptoms.In the United States and Canada:*Gentiva Health Services, national provider of hospice and home health services...
s. Despite being the youngest member of a board composed of strong personalities, 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
Gentrification
Gentrification and urban gentrification refer to the changes that result when wealthier people acquire or rent property in low income and working class communities. Urban gentrification is associated with movement. Consequent to gentrification, the average income increases and average family size...
, although in the end she voted in favor of most of the projects.
Sotomayor was appointed by Mayor Ed Koch
Ed Koch
Edward Irving "Ed" Koch is an American lawyer, politician, and political commentator. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1969 to 1977 and three terms as mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989...
in 1988 as one of the founding members of the New York City Campaign Finance Board
New York City Campaign Finance Board
The New York City Campaign Finance Board is an independent, nonpartisan agency of the City of New York. It was created in 1988 in the wake of several political corruption scandals. It gives public matching funds to qualifying candidates, who in exchange submit to strict contribution and spending...
, 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
David Dinkins
David Norman Dinkins is a former politician from New York City. He was the Mayor of New York City from 1990 through 1993; he was the first and is, to date, the only African American to hold that office.-Early life:...
, and Rudy Giuliani
Rudy Giuliani
Rudolph William Louis "Rudy" Giuliani KBE is an American lawyer, businessman, and politician from New York. He served as Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001....
.
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
New York City Council
The New York City Council is the lawmaking body of the City of New York. It has 51 members from 51 council districts throughout the five boroughs. The Council serves as a check against the mayor in a "strong" mayor-council government model. The council monitors performance of city agencies and...
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.
Nomination and confirmation
Sotomayor had wanted to become a judge since she was in elementary school, and in 1991 she was recommended for a spot by Democratic New York senator Daniel Patrick MoynihanDaniel Patrick Moynihan
Daniel Patrick "Pat" Moynihan was an American politician and sociologist. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected to the United States Senate for New York in 1976, and was re-elected three times . He declined to run for re-election in 2000...
. Moynihan had an arrangement with his fellow New York senator, Republican Al D'Amato
Al D'Amato
Alfonse Marcello "Al" D'Amato is an American lawyer and former New York politician. A Republican, he served as United States Senator from New York from 1981 to 1999.-Early life and family:...
, whereby he would get to choose roughly one out of every four New York district court seats even though a Republican was in the White House. Moynihan also wanted to fulfill a public promise he had made to get a Hispanic judge appointed for New York. When Moynihan's staff recommended her to him, they said "Have we got a judge for you!" Moynihan identified with her socio-economic and academic background and became convinced she would become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. D'Amato became an enthusiastic backer of Sotomayor, who was seen as politically centrist at the time. Of the impending drop in salary from private practice, Sotomayor said: "I've never wanted to get adjusted to my income because I knew I wanted to go back to public service. And in comparison to what my mother earns and how I was raised, it's not modest at all."
Sotomayor was thus nominated on November 27, 1991, by President George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 41st President of the United States . He had previously served as the 43rd Vice President of the United States , a congressman, an ambassador, and Director of Central Intelligence.Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, to...
to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by John M. Walker, Jr.
John M. Walker, Jr.
John Mercer Walker, Jr. is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and a cousin of U.S. Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush...
Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, led by a friendly Democratic majority, went smoothly for her in June 1992, with her pro bono activities winning praise from Senator Ted Kennedy
Ted Kennedy
Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy was a United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party. Serving almost 47 years, he was the second most senior member of the Senate when he died and is the fourth-longest-serving senator in United States history...
and her getting unanimous approval from the committee. Then a Republican senator blocked her nomination and that of three others for a while in retaliation for an unrelated block Democrats had put on another nominee. D'Amato objected strongly; some weeks later, the block was dropped, and Sotomayor was confirmed by unanimous consent
Unanimous consent
In parliamentary procedure, unanimous consent, also known as general consent, or in the case of the parliaments under the Westminster system, leave of the house, is a situation in which no one present objects to a proposal. The chair may state, for instance: "If there is no objection, the motion...
of the full United States Senate
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
on August 11, 1992, and received her commission the next day.
Sotomayor became the youngest judge in the Southern District and the first Hispanic federal judge in New York State. She became the first Puerto Rican woman to serve as a judge in a U.S. federal court. She was one of seven women among the district's 58 judges. She moved from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
Carroll Gardens is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, USA. The area is named for Charles Carroll, a revolutionary war veteran who was also the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence...
, back to the Bronx in order to live within her district.
Judgeship
Sotomayor generally kept a low public profile as a district court judge. She showed a willingness to take anti-government positions in a number of cases, and during her first year in the seat, she received high ratings from liberal public-interest groups. Other sources and organizations regarded her as a centrist during this period. In criminal cases, she gained a reputation for tough sentencing and was not viewed as a pro-defense judge. A Syracuse UniversitySyracuse University
Syracuse University is a private research university located in Syracuse, New York, United States. Its roots can be traced back to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1832, which also later founded Genesee College...
study found that in such cases, Sotomayor generally handed out longer sentences than her colleagues, especially when white-collar crime
White-collar crime
Within the field of criminology, white-collar crime has been defined by Edwin Sutherland as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation" . Sutherland was a proponent of Symbolic Interactionism, and believed that criminal behavior was...
was involved. Fellow district judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum
Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum
Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum is a senior judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York...
was an influence on Sotomayor in adopting a narrow, "just the facts" approach to judicial decision-making.
As a trial judge, she garnered a reputation for being well-prepared in advance of a case and moving cases along a tight schedule. Lawyers before her court viewed her as plain-spoken, intelligent, demanding, and sometimes somewhat unforgiving; one said, "She does not have much patience for people trying to snow her. You can't do it."
Notable rulings
On March 30, 1995, in Silverman v. Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee, Inc., Sotomayor issued a preliminary injunction against Major League BaseballMajor League Baseball
Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
, preventing it from unilaterally implementing a new collective bargaining
Collective bargaining
Collective bargaining is a process of negotiations between employers and the representatives of a unit of employees aimed at reaching agreements that regulate working conditions...
agreement and using replacement players. Her ruling ended the 1994 baseball strike after 232 days, the day before the new season was scheduled to begin. The Second Circuit upheld Sotomayor's decision and denied the owners' request to stay the ruling. The decision raised her profile, won her the plaudits of baseball fans, and had a lasting effect on the game.
In Dow Jones v. Department of Justice (1995), Sotomayor sided with the Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
in its efforts to obtain and publish a photocopy of the last note left by former Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster
Vince Foster
Vincent Walker Foster, Jr. was a Deputy White House Counsel during the first few months of President Bill Clinton's administration, and also a law partner and friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton...
. Sotomayor ruled that the public had "a substantial interest" in viewing the note and enjoined the U.S. Justice Department from blocking its release.
In New York Times Co. v. Tasini
New York Times Co. v. Tasini
New York Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483 , is a leading decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of copyright in the contents of a newspaper database...
(1997), freelance journalists sued the New York Times Company for copyright infringement for the New York Times
LexisNexis
LexisNexis Group is a company providing computer-assisted legal research services. In 2006 it had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records related information...
) of the work of freelancers it had published. Sotomayor ruled that the publisher had the right to license the freelancer's work. This decision was reversed on appeal, and the Supreme Court upheld the reversal; two dissenters (John Paul Stevens
John Paul Stevens
John Paul Stevens served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from December 19, 1975 until his retirement on June 29, 2010. At the time of his retirement, he was the oldest member of the Court and the third-longest serving justice in the Court's history...
and Stephen Breyer
Stephen Breyer
Stephen Gerald Breyer is an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and known for his pragmatic approach to constitutional law, Breyer is generally associated with the more liberal side of the Court....
) took Sotomayor's position.
In Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group
Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group
Castle Rock Entertainment Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group, 150 F.3d 132 , was a U.S. copyright infringement case involving the popular American sitcom Seinfeld. Some U.S. copyright law courses use the case to illustrate modern application of the fair use doctrine...
(also in 1997), Sotomayor ruled that a book of trivia from the television program Seinfeld
Seinfeld
Seinfeld is an American television sitcom that originally aired on NBC from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998, lasting nine seasons, and is now in syndication. It was created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, the latter starring as a fictionalized version of himself...
infringed on the copyright of the show's producer and did not constitute legal fair use
Fair use
Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...
. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is one of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals...
upheld Sotomayor's ruling.
Nomination and confirmation
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which was vacated by J. Daniel Mahoney
J. Daniel Mahoney
John Daniel Mahoney was a New York-based judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit....
. Her nomination was initially expected to have smooth sailing, with the American Bar Association
American Bar Association
The American Bar Association , founded August 21, 1878, is a voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students, which is not specific to any jurisdiction in the United States. The ABA's most important stated activities are the setting of academic standards for law schools, and the formulation...
giving her a "well qualified" professional assessment, but as The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
described, "[it became] embroiled in the sometimes tortured judicial politics of the Senate." Some in the Republican majority believed Clinton was eager to name the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice and that an easy confirmation to the appeals court would put Sotomayor in a better position for a possible Supreme Court nomination (despite there being no vacancy at the time nor any indication the Clinton administration was considering nominating her or any Hispanic), and therefore they decided to slow her confirmation. Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh
Rush Hudson Limbaugh III is an American radio talk show host, conservative political commentator, and an opinion leader in American conservatism. He hosts The Rush Limbaugh Show which is aired throughout the U.S. on Premiere Radio Networks and is the highest-rated talk-radio program in the United...
weighed in that Sotomayor was an ultraliberal who was on a "rocket ship" to the highest court.
During her September 1997 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee
United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary
The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary is a standing committee of the United States Senate, of the United States Congress. The Judiciary Committee, with 18 members, is charged with conducting hearings prior to the Senate votes on confirmation of federal judges nominated by the...
, Sotomayor parried strong questioning from some Republican members about mandatory sentencing
Mandatory sentencing
A mandatory sentence is a court decision setting where judicial discretion is limited by law. Typically, people convicted of certain crimes must be punished with at least a minimum number of years in prison...
, gay rights, and her level of respect for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
Clarence Thomas
Clarence Thomas is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Succeeding Thurgood Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the Court....
. After a long wait, she was approved by the committee in March 1998, with only two dissensions. However, in June 1998, the influential Wall Street Journal editorial page opined that the Clinton administration intended to “get her on to the Second Circuit, then elevate her to the Supreme Court as soon as an opening occurs”; the editorial criticized two of her district court rulings and urged further delay of her confirmation. The Republican block continued.
Ranking Democratic committee member Patrick Leahy
Patrick Leahy
Patrick Joseph Leahy is the senior United States Senator from Vermont and member of the Democratic Party. He is the first and only elected Democratic United States Senator in Vermont's history. He is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Leahy is the second most senior U.S. Senator,...
objected to Republican use of a secret hold
Secret hold
In the United States Senate, a hold is a parliamentary procedure permitted by the Standing Rules of the United States Senate which allows one or more Senators to prevent a motion from reaching a vote on the Senate floor....
to slow down the Sotomayor nomination, and Leahy attributed that anonymous tactic to GOP reticence about publicly opposing a female Hispanic nominee. The prior month, Leahy had triggered a procedural delay in the confirmation of fellow Second Circuit nominee Chester J. Straub
Chester J. Straub
Chester John Straub is a Senior Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit headquartered in New York City.-Life:...
—who, although advanced by Clinton and supported by Senator Moynihan, was considered much more acceptable by Republicans—in an unsuccessful effort to force earlier consideration of the Sotomayor confirmation.
During 1998, several Hispanic organizations organized a petition drive in New York State, generating hundreds of signatures from New Yorkers to try to convince New York Republican senator Al D'Amato
Al D'Amato
Alfonse Marcello "Al" D'Amato is an American lawyer and former New York politician. A Republican, he served as United States Senator from New York from 1981 to 1999.-Early life and family:...
to push the Senate leadership to bring Sotomayor's nomination to a vote. D'Amato, a backer of Sotomayor to begin with and additionally concerned about being up for re-election that year, helped move Republican leadership. Her nomination had been pending for over a year when Majority Leader Trent Lott
Trent Lott
Chester Trent Lott, Sr. , is a former United States Senator from Mississippi and has served in numerous leadership positions in the House of Representatives and the Senate....
scheduled the vote. With complete Democratic support, and support from 25 Republican senators including Judiciary chair Orrin Hatch
Orrin Hatch
Orrin Grant Hatch is the senior United States Senator for Utah and is a member of the Republican Party. Hatch served as the chairman or ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1993 to 2005...
, Sotomayor was confirmed on October 2, 1998, by a 67–29 vote. She received her commission on October 7. The confirmation experience left Sotomayor somewhat angry; she said shortly afterwards that during the hearings Republicans had assumed her political beliefs based on her being a Latina: "That series of questions, I think, were symbolic of a set of expectations that some people had [that] I must be liberal. It is stereotyping, and stereotyping is perhaps the most insidious of all problems in our society today."
Judgeship
Over her ten years on the Second Circuit, Sotomayor heard appeals in more than 3,000 cases and wrote about 380 opinions where she was in the majority. The Supreme Court reviewed five of those, reversing three and affirming two—not high numbers for an appellate judge of that many years and a typical percentage of reversals.Sotomayor's circuit court rulings led to her being considered a political centrist
Centrism
In politics, centrism is the ideal or the practice of promoting policies that lie different from the standard political left and political right. Most commonly, this is visualized as part of the one-dimensional political spectrum of left-right politics, with centrism landing in the middle between...
by the ABA Journal
ABA Journal
The ABA Journal is a monthly legal trade magazine and the flagship publication of the American Bar Association. It claims to be "read by half of the nation's 1 million lawyers every month"...
and other sources and organizations. Several lawyers, legal experts, and news organizations identified her as someone with liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
inclinations. In any case, the Second Circuit's caseload typically skewed more toward business and securities law rather than hot-button social or constitutional issues. Sotomayor tended to write narrow rulings that relied on close application of the law rather than import general philosophical viewpoints. A Congressional Research Service
Congressional Research Service
The Congressional Research Service , known as "Congress's think tank", is the public policy research arm of the United States Congress. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS works exclusively and directly for Members of Congress, their Committees and staff on a...
analysis found that Sotomayor's rulings defied easy ideological categorization, but did show an adherence to precedent, an emphasis on the facts of a case, and an avoidance of overstepping the circuit court's judicial role. Unusually, Sotomayor read through all the supporting documents of cases under review; her lengthy rulings explored every aspect of a case and tended to feature leaden, ungainly prose. Some legal experts have said that Sotomayor's attention to detail and re-examination of the facts of a case came close to overstepping the traditional role of appellate judges.
Across some 150 cases involving business and civil law, Sotomayor's rulings were generally unpredictable and not consistently pro-business or anti-business. Sotomayor's influence in the federal judiciary, as measured by the number of citations of her rulings by other judges and in law review articles, increased significantly during the length of her appellate judgeship and was greater than that of some other prominent federal appeals court judges. Two academic studies showed that the percentage of Sotomayor's decisions that overrode policy decisions by elected branches was the same as or lower than that of other circuit judges.
Sotomayor was a member of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts. In October 2001, she presented the annual Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley School of Law; titled "A Latina Judge's Voice"; it was published in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal the following spring. In the speech, she discussed the characteristics of her Latina upbringing and culture and the history of minorities and women ascending to the federal bench. She said the low number of minority women on the federal bench at that time was "shocking". She then discussed at length how her own experiences as a Latina might affect her decisions as a judge. In any case, her background in activism did not necessarily influence her rulings: in a study of 50 racial discrimination cases brought before her panel, 45 were rejected, with Sotomayor never filing a dissent. An expanded study showed that Sotomayor decided 97 cases involving a claim of discrimination and rejected those claims nearly 90 percent of the time. Another examination of Second Circuit split decisions on cases that dealt with race and discrimination showed no clear ideological pattern in Sotomayor's opinions.
In the Court of Appeals seat, Sotomayor gained a reputation for vigorous and blunt behavior toward lawyers appealing before her, sometimes to the point of brusque and curt treatment or testy interruptions. She was known for extensive preparation for oral arguments and for running a "hot bench", where judges ask lawyers plenty of questions. Unprepared lawyers suffered the consequences, but the vigorous questioning was an aid to lawyers seeking to tailor their arguments to the judge's concerns. The 2009 Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which collected anonymous evaluations of judges by lawyers who appear before them, contained a wide range of reactions to Sotomayor. Comments also diverged among lawyers willing to be named. Attorney Sheema Chaudhry said, “She’s brilliant and she’s qualified, but I just feel that she can be very, how do you say, temperamental.” Defense lawyer Gerald B. Lefcourt
Gerald B. Lefcourt
Gerald B. Lefcourt is a criminal defense lawyer with a reputation for taking on unpopular and high-profile clients, including such clients as the Black Panthers, Abbie Hoffman, Harry Helmsley, a co-defendant of Michael Milken, former New York State Assembly Speaker, Mel Miller, Russell Crowe, and...
said, “She used her questioning to make a point, as opposed to really looking for an answer to a question she did not understand.” In contrast, Second Circuit Judge Richard C. Wesley
Richard C. Wesley
Richard Carl Wesley is a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.- Education and background :...
said that his interactions with Sotomayor had been “totally antithetical to this perception that has gotten some traction that she is somehow confrontational.” Second Circuit Judge and former teacher Guido Calabresi said his tracking showed that Sotomayor's questioning patterns were no different from other members of the court and added, “Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman. [The criticism] was sexist, plain and simple.”
Sotomayor's law clerk
Law clerk
A law clerk or a judicial clerk is a person who provides assistance to a judge in researching issues before the court and in writing opinions. Law clerks are not court clerks or courtroom deputies, who are administrative staff for the court. Most law clerks are recent law school graduates who...
s regarded her as a valuable and strong mentor, and she said that she viewed them like family.
In 2005, Senate Democrats suggested Sotomayor, among others, to President George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
as an acceptable nominee to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor is an American jurist who was the first female member of the Supreme Court of the United States. She served as an Associate Justice from 1981 until her retirement from the Court in 2006. O'Connor was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981...
.
Notable rulings
AbortionIn the 2002 decision Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush
Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush
Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush, , was a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the Bush Administration's re-imposition of the Mexico City Policy, which states that "the United States will no longer contribute to separate nongovernmental...
, Sotomayor upheld the Bush administration
George W. Bush administration
The presidency of George W. Bush began on January 20, 2001, when he was inaugurated as the 43rd President of the United States of America. The oldest son of former president George H. W. Bush, George W...
's implementation of the Mexico City Policy
Mexico City Policy
The Mexico City Policy, also known by critics as the Mexico City Gag Rule and the Global Gag Rule, was an intermittent United States government policy that required all non-governmental organizations that receive federal funding to refrain from performing or promoting abortion services, as a...
, which states that "the United States will no longer contribute to separate nongovernmental organizations which perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations." Sotomayor held that the policy did not constitute a violation of equal protection
Equal Protection Clause
The Equal Protection Clause, part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, provides that "no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"...
, as "the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds."
First Amendment rights
In Pappas v. Giuliani
Pappas v. Giuliani
Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143 , was a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution was not violated where a police officer was fired for mailing out racially offensive political materials from his...
(2002), Sotomayor dissented from her colleagues’ ruling that the New York Police Department could terminate an employee from his desk job who sent racist materials through the mail. Sotomayor argued that the First Amendment
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
protected speech by the employee “away from the office, on [his] own time,” even if that speech was "offensive, hateful, and insulting," and that therefore the employee's First Amendment claim should have gone to trial rather than being dismissed on summary judgment.
In 2005, Judge Sotomayor wrote the opinion for United States v. Quattrone. Frank Quattrone had been on trial on charges of obstructing investigations related to technology IPOs. Some members of the media had wanted to publish the names of the jurors deciding Quattrone's case, and a district court had issued an order to forbid the publication of the juror's names. In United States v. Quattrone, Judge Sotomayor wrote the opinion for the Second Circuit panel striking down this order on First Amendment grounds, stating that the media should be free to publish the names of the jurors. The first trial ended in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial, and the district court ordered the media not to publish the names of jurors, even though those names had been disclosed in open court. Judge Sotomayor held that although it was important to protect the fairness of the retrial, the district court's order was an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech and violated the right of the press to "to report freely on events that transpire in an open courtroom."
In 2008, Sotomayor was on a three-judge panel in Doninger v. Niehoff
Doninger v. Niehoff
Doninger v. Niehoff, 527 F.3d 41 was a United States Court of Appeals case. The case was heard by a three-judge Second Circuit panel that included Judges Sonia Sotomayor, Loretta A. Preska, and Debra Livingston. The case involved a student at Lewis S...
that unanimously affirmed, in an opinion written by Second Circuit Judge Debra Livingston, the district court's judgment that Lewis S. Mills High School
Lewis S. Mills High School
Lewis S. Mills High School is a public high school located in Burlington, Connecticut. It is part of Regional School District #10 serving Harwinton and Burlington, Connecticut. It is connected to Har-Bur Middle School. Both LSM and Har-Bur connect to a library, known as "The Learning Center"....
did not violate the First Amendment rights of a student when it barred her from running for student government after she called the superintendent and other school officials "douchebags" in a blog post written while off-campus that encouraged students to call an administrator and "piss her off more". Judge Livingston held that the district judge did not abuse her discretion in holding that the student's speech "foreseeably create[d] a risk of substantial disruption within the school environment", which is the precedent in the Second Circuit for when schools may regulate off-campus speech. Although Sotomayor did not write this opinion, she has been criticized by some who disagree with it.
Second Amendment rights
Sotomayor was part of the three-judge Second Circuit panel that affirmed the district court's ruling in Maloney v. Cuomo (2009). Maloney was arrested for possession of nunchaku
Nunchaku
is a traditional Okinawan weapon consisting of two sticks connected at their ends with a short chain or rope.-Etymology:The Japanese word nunchaku is the Kun'yomi reading of the Kanji term for a traditional Chinese two section staff....
, which are illegal in New York; Maloney argued that this law violated his Second Amendment
Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights that protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights.In 2008 and 2010, the Supreme Court issued two Second...
right to bear arms. The Second Circuit's per curiam opinion noted that the Supreme Court has not, so far, ever held that the Second Amendment is binding against state governments. On the contrary, in Presser v. Illinois
Presser v. Illinois
Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 , was a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States holding that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution limited only the power of Congress and the national government to control firearms, not that of the state.-Background:In this 1886 case,...
, a Supreme Court case from 1886, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment "is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state." With respect to the Presser v. Illinois precedent, the panel stated that only the Supreme Court has "the prerogative of overruling its own decisions," and the recent Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v. Heller
District of Columbia v. Heller
District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 , was a landmark case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects an individual's right to possess a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes in federal enclaves, such as...
(which struck down the district's gun ban as unconstitutional) did "not invalidate this longstanding principle." The panel upheld the lower court's decision dismissing Maloney's challenge to New York's law against possession of nunchaku. On June 2, 2009, a Seventh Circuit
United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is a federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the courts in the following districts:* Central District of Illinois* Northern District of Illinois...
panel, including the prominent and heavily cited judges Richard Posner
Richard Posner
Richard Allen Posner is an American jurist, legal theorist, and economist who is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School...
and Frank Easterbrook, unanimously agreed with Maloney v. Cuomo, citing the case in their decision turning back a challenge to Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
's gun laws and noting the Supreme Court precedents remain in force until altered by the Supreme Court itself.
Fourth Amendment rights
In N.G. & S.G. ex rel. S.C. v. Connecticut (2004), Sotomayor dissented from her colleagues’ decision to uphold a series of strip searches of “troubled adolescent girls” in juvenile detention centers. While Sotomayor agreed that some of the strip searches at issue in the case were lawful, she would have held that due to “the severely intrusive nature of strip searches,” they should not be allowed “in the absence of individualized suspicion, of adolescents who have never been charged with a crime.” She argued that an "individualized suspicion" rule was more consistent with Second Circuit precedent than the majority's rule.
In Leventhal v. Knapek (2001), Sotomayor rejected a Fourth Amendment
Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause...
challenge by a U.S. Department of Transportation employee whose employer searched his office computer. She held that, “Even though [the employee] had some expectation of privacy in the contents of his office computer, the investigatory searches by the DOT did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights” because here “there were reasonable grounds to believe” that the search would reveal evidence of “work-related misconduct.”
Alcohol in commerce
In 2004, Sotomayor was part of the judge panel that ruled in Swedenburg v. Kelly
Granholm v. Heald
Granholm v. Heald, 544 U.S. 460 , was a court case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in a 5-4 decision that ruled that laws in New York and Michigan that permitted in-state wineries to ship wine directly to consumers, but prohibited out-of-state wineries from doing the same, were...
that New York's law prohibiting out-of-state wineries from shipping directly to consumers in New York was constitutional even though in-state wineries were allowed to. The case, which invoked the 21st Amendment
Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution repealed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had mandated nationwide Prohibition...
, was appealed and attached to another case. The case reached the Supreme Court later on as Swedenburg v. Kelly and was overruled in a 5–4 decision that found the law was discriminatory and unconstitutional.
Employment discrimination
Sotomayor was involved in the high-profile case Ricci v. DeStefano
Ricci v. DeStefano
Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658, 2671, 174 L. Ed. 2d 490 is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States arising from a lawsuit brought against the city of New Haven, Connecticut by twenty city firefighters alleging that the city discriminated against them with regard to promotions...
that initially upheld the right of the City of New Haven
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...
to throw out its test for firefighters and start over with a new test, because the City believed the test had a "disparate impact" on minority firefighters. (No black firefighters qualified for promotion under the test, whereas some had qualified under tests used in previous years.) The City was concerned that minority firefighters might sue under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against African Americans and women, including racial segregation...
. The City chose not to certify the test results and a lower court had previously upheld the City's right to do this. Several white firefighters and one Hispanic firefighter who had passed the test, including the lead plaintiff who has dyslexia and had put much extra effort into studying, sued the City of New Haven, claiming that their rights were violated. A Second Circuit panel that included Sotomayor first issued a brief, unsigned summary order
Summary order
In law, a summary order is a determination made by a court without issuing a legal opinion. This disposition is also known as a nonopinion, summary disposition, summary opinion, affirmance without opinion, unpublished order, disposition without opinion, or abbreviated disposition...
(not written by Sotomayor) affirming the lower court's ruling. Sotomayor's former mentor José A. Cabranes
José A. Cabranes
José Alberto Cabranes , is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Formerly a practicing lawyer, government official, and law teacher, he was the first Puerto Rican appointed to a federal judgeship in the continental United States .-Background:Cabranes was born in...
, by now a fellow judge on the court, objected to this handling and requested that the court hear it en banc
En banc
En banc, in banc, in banco or in bank is a French term used to refer to the hearing of a legal case where all judges of a court will hear the case , rather than a panel of them. It is often used for unusually complex cases or cases considered to be of greater importance...
. Sotomayor voted with a 7–6 majority not to rehear it and a slightly expanded ruling was issued, but a strong dissent by Cabranes led to the case reaching the Supreme Court in 2009. There it was overruled in a 5–4 decision that found the white firefighters had been victims of racial discrimination when they were denied promotion.
Business
In Clarett v. National Football League (2004), Sotomayor upheld the National Football League
National Football League
The National Football League is the highest level of professional American football in the United States, and is considered the top professional American football league in the world. It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, with the league changing...
's eligibility rules requiring players to wait three full seasons after high school graduation before entering the NFL draft. Maurice Clarett
Maurice Clarett
Maurice Edward Clarett is an American football running back for the Omaha Nighthawks of the United Football League. During his freshman year at Ohio State University in 2002, he helped lead the Buckeyes to a national championship...
challenged these rules, which were part of the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and its players, on antitrust grounds. Sotomayor held that Clarett's claim would upset the established "federal labor law favoring and governing the collective bargaining process."
In Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Dabit
Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Dabit
Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Dabit, 547 U.S. 71 , was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States involving the extent to which state law securities fraud class action claims were preempted by the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act of 1998...
(2005), Sotomayor wrote a unanimous opinion that the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act of 1998 did not preempt class action
Class action
In law, a class action, a class suit, or a representative action is a form of lawsuit in which a large group of people collectively bring a claim to court and/or in which a class of defendants is being sued...
claims in state courts by stockbrokers alleging misleading inducement to buy or sell stocks. The Supreme Court handed down an 8–0 decision stating that the Act did preempt such claims, thereby overruling Sotomayor's decision.
In Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp.
Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp.
Specht v. Netscape, 306 F.3d 17 , is a case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit regarding the enforceability of browse-wrap software licenses...
(2001), she ruled that the license agreement of Netscape's Smart Download software did not constitute a binding contract because the system didn't give "sufficient notice" to the user.
Civil rights
In Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko (2000), Sotomayor, writing for the court, supported the right of an individual to sue a private corporation working on behalf of the federal government for alleged violations of that individual's constitutional rights. Reversing a lower court decision, Sotomayor found that an existing Supreme Court doctrine, known as "Bivens"—which allows suits against individuals working for the federal government for constitutional rights violations—could be applied to the case of a former prisoner seeking to sue the private company operating the federal halfway house facility in which he resided. The Supreme Court reversed Sotomayor's ruling in a 5–4 decision, saying that the Bivens doctrine could not be expanded to cover private entities working on behalf of the federal government. Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer dissented, siding with Sotomayor's original ruling.
In Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education (1999), the parents of a black student alleged that he had been harassed due to his race and had been discriminated against when he was transferred from a first grade class to a kindergarten class without parental consent, while similarly situated white students were treated differently. Sotomayor agreed with the dismissal of the harassment claims due to lack of evidence, but would have allowed the discrimination claim to go forward. She wrote in dissent that the grade transfer was "contrary to the school's established policies" as well as its treatment of white students, which "supports the inference that race discrimination played a role".
Property rights
In Krimstock v. Kelly (2002), Sotomayor wrote an opinion halting New York City's practice of seizing the motor vehicles of drivers accused of driving while intoxicated and some other crimes and holding those vehicles for "months or even years" during criminal proceedings. Noting the importance of cars to many individuals' livelihoods or daily activities, she held that it violated individuals' due process rights to hold the vehicles without permitting the owners to challenge the City's continued possession of their property.
In Brody v. Village of Port Chester (2003 and 2005), a takings case, Sotomayor first ruled in 2003 for a unanimous panel that a property owner in Port Chester, New York
Port Chester, New York
Port Chester is a village in Westchester County, New York, United States. The village is part of the town of Rye. As of the 2010 census, Port Chester had a population of 28,967...
was permitted to challenge the state’s Eminent Domain Procedure Law. A district court subsequently rejected the plaintiff's claims and upon appeal the case found itself again with the Second Circuit. In 2005, Sotomayor ruled with a panel majority that the property owner's due process rights had been violated by lack of adequate notice to him of his right to challenge a village order that his land should be used for a redevelopment project. However, the panel supported the village's taking of the property for public use.
In Didden v. Village of Port Chester (2006), an unrelated case brought about by the same town's actions, Sotomayor joined a unanimous panel's summary order to uphold a trial court's dismissal – due to a statute of limitations lapse – of a property owner's objection to his land being condemned for a redevelopment project. The ruling further said that even without the lapse, the owner's petition would be denied due to application of the Supreme Court's recent Kelo v. City of New London
Kelo v. City of New London
Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States involving the use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another to further economic development...
ruling. The Second Circuit's reasoning drew criticism from libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
commentators.
Nomination and confirmation
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
's election there had been speculation that Sotomayor could be a leading candidate for a Supreme Court seat. New York senators Charles Schumer
Charles Schumer
Charles Ellis "Chuck" Schumer is the senior United States Senator from New York and a member of the Democratic Party. First elected in 1998, he defeated three-term Republican incumbent Al D'Amato by a margin of 55%–44%. He was easily re-elected in 2004 by a margin of 71%–24% and in 2010 by a...
and Kirsten Gillibrand
Kirsten Gillibrand
Kirsten Elizabeth Rutnik Gillibrand is an attorney and the junior United States Senator from the state of New York and a member of the Democratic Party...
wrote a joint letter to Obama urging him to appoint Sotomayor, or alternatively Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
Ken Salazar
Kenneth Lee "Ken" Salazar is the current United States Secretary of the Interior, in the administration of President Barack Obama. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as a United States Senator from Colorado from 2005 to 2009. He and Mel Martinez were the first Hispanic U.S...
, to the Supreme Court if a vacancy should arise during his term. The White House first contacted Sotomayor on April 27, 2009, about the possibility of her nomination. On April 30, 2009, Justice David Souter
David Souter
David Hackett Souter is a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served from 1990 until his retirement on June 29, 2009. Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat vacated by William J...
's retirement plans leaked to the media, and Sotomayor received early attention as a possible nominee for Souter's seat to be vacated in June 2009. On May 25, Obama informed Sotomayor of his choice; she later said, "I had my [hand] over my chest, trying to calm my beating heart, literally." On May 26, 2009, Obama nominated her. She became only the second jurist to be nominated to three different judicial positions by three different presidents.
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 she had used in some form in a number of her speeches, particularly 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. The rhetoric quickly became inflamed, with radio commentator Rush Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh
Rush Hudson Limbaugh III is an American radio talk show host, conservative political commentator, and an opinion leader in American conservatism. He hosts The Rush Limbaugh Show which is aired throughout the U.S. on Premiere Radio Networks and is the highest-rated talk-radio program in the United...
and former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives
Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
The Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, or Speaker of the House, is the presiding officer of the United States House of Representatives...
Newt Gingrich
Newt Gingrich
Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich is a U.S. Republican Party politician who served as the House Minority Whip from 1989 to 1995 and as the 58th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999....
calling Sotomayor a "racist" (although the latter later backtracked from that claim), while John Cornyn
John Cornyn
John Cornyn, III is the junior United States Senator for Texas, serving since 2003. He is a member of the Republican Party. He was elected Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the 111th U.S. Congress....
and other Republican senators denounced such attacks but said that Sotomayor's approach was troubling. Backers of Sotomayor offered a variety of explanations in defense of the remark, and White House Press Secretary
White House Press Secretary
The White House Press Secretary is a senior White House official whose primary responsibility is to act as spokesperson for the government administration....
Robert Gibbs
Robert Gibbs
Robert Lane Gibbs was the 28th White House Press Secretary. Gibbs was the communications director for then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama and Obama's 2008 presidential campaign...
stated that Sotomayor's word choice in 2001 had been "poor". Sotomayor subsequently clarified her remark through Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy
Patrick Leahy
Patrick Joseph Leahy is the senior United States Senator from Vermont and member of the Democratic Party. He is the first and only elected Democratic United States Senator in Vermont's history. He is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Leahy is the second most senior U.S. Senator,...
, 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
Ricci v. DeStefano
Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658, 2671, 174 L. Ed. 2d 490 is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States arising from a lawsuit brought against the city of New Haven, Connecticut by twenty city firefighters alleging that the city discriminated against them with regard to promotions...
received the most attention during the early nomination discussion, and in the midst of her confirmation process the Supreme Court overturned that ruling on June 29. Some of the fervor with which conservatives and Republicans viewed the Sotomayor nomination was due to their grievances over the history of federal judicial nomination battles going back to the 1987 Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination
Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination
The Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination refers to the 1987 nomination by President Ronald Reagan of Judge Robert Bork to serve as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The U.S. Senate rejected his nomination.-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. 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
American Bar Association
The American Bar Association , founded August 21, 1878, is a voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students, which is not specific to any jurisdiction in the United States. The ABA's most important stated activities are the setting of academic standards for law schools, and the formulation...
gave her a unanimous "well qualified" assessment, its highest mark for professional qualification. Following the Ricci overruling, Rasmussen Reports
Rasmussen Reports
Rasmussen Reports is an American media company that publishes and distributes information based on public opinion polling. Founded by pollster Scott Rasmussen in 2003, the company updates daily indexes including the President's job approval rating, and provides public opinion data, analysis, and...
and CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
/Opinion Research polls showed that the public was now sharply divided, largely along partisan and ideological lines, as to whether Sotomayor should be confirmed.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Benjamin Nathan Cardozo was a well-known American lawyer and associate Supreme Court Justice. Cardozo is remembered for his significant influence on the development of American common law in the 20th century, in addition to his modesty, philosophy, and vivid prose style...
. 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 was confirmed by the full Senate by a vote of 68–31. The vote was largely along party lines, with no Democrats opposing her and nine Republicans supporting her. (A year later, Obama's second court pick, Elena Kagan
Elena Kagan
Elena Kagan is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, serving since August 7, 2010. Kagan is the Court's 112th justice and fourth female justice....
, won confirmation by a 63–37 vote.)
President Obama commissioned Sotomayor on the day of her confirmation; Sotomayor was sworn in on August 8, 2009, by Chief Justice John Roberts
John Roberts
John Glover Roberts, Jr. is the 17th and current Chief Justice of the United States. He has served since 2005, having been nominated by President George W. Bush after the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist...
. Sotomayor is the first Hispanic
Hispanic and Latino Americans
Hispanic or Latino Americans are Americans with origins in the Hispanic countries of Latin America or in Spain, and in general all persons in the United States who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino.1990 Census of Population and Housing: A self-designated classification for people whose origins...
to serve on the Supreme Court. (Some attention has been given to Justice Benjamin Cardozo – a Sephardic Jew believed to be of distant Portuguese
Portuguese people
The Portuguese are a nation and ethnic group native to the country of Portugal, in the west of the Iberian peninsula of south-west Europe. Their language is Portuguese, and Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion....
descent – as the first Hispanic on the court when appointed in 1932, but his roots were uncertain, the term "Hispanic" was not in use as an ethnic identifier at the time, and the Portuguese are generally excluded from its meaning.) Sotomayor is also the third woman to serve on the Court, following Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor is an American jurist who was the first female member of the Supreme Court of the United States. She served as an Associate Justice from 1981 until her retirement from the Court in 2006. O'Connor was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981...
and Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Ginsburg was appointed by President Bill Clinton and took the oath of office on August 10, 1993. She is the second female justice and the first Jewish female justice.She is generally viewed as belonging to...
. Her appointment gives the Court a record six Roman Catholic justices serving at the same time.
Justiceship
Sotomayor cast her first vote as an associate Supreme Court justice on August 17, 2009, in a stay of execution case. She was given a warm welcome onto the Court and was formally investedInvestiture
Investiture, from the Latin is a rather general term for the formal installation of an incumbent...
in a September 8 ceremony. Sotomayor heard arguments in her first case on September 9 during a special session. The case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, , was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court holding that the First Amendment prohibits government from censoring political broadcasts in candidate elections when those broadcasts are funded by corporations or unions...
, involved the First Amendment
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
rights of corporations in campaign finance and became one of the most controversial and consequential decisions in a number of years, and one in which Sotomayor dissented. Her first major written opinion was a dissent in the Berghuis v. Thompkins
Berghuis v. Thompkins
Berghuis v. Thompkins, , is a decision by the United States Supreme Court in which the Court considered the position of a suspect who understands his or her right to remain silent under Miranda v. Arizona and is aware he or she has the right to remain silent, but does not explicitly invoke or...
case dealing with Miranda rights.
As her first year neared completion, Sotomayor said it had been exciting, challenging and a little scary; she told friends she felt swamped by the intensity and heavy workload of the job. In succeeding Justice Souter, Sotomayor had done little to change the philosophical balance of the Court, as she was a reliable member of the liberal bloc when the justices divided along the commonly perceived ideological lines. Sotomayor voted with Justices Ginsburg and Breyer 90 percent of the time, one of the highest agreement rates on the Court.
Other activities
New York University School of Law
The New York University School of Law is the law school of New York University. Established in 1835, the school offers the J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. degrees in law, and is located in Greenwich Village, in the New York City borough of Manhattan....
from 1998 to 2007. There she taught trial and appellate advocacy as well as a federal appellate court seminar. She has been a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School
Columbia Law School
Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, is one of the oldest and most prestigious law schools in the United States. A member of the Ivy League, Columbia Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Columbia University in New York City. It offers the J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. degrees in...
since 1999, a paying, adjunct faculty position. There she created and has co-taught a class called the Federal Appellate Externship every semester since 2000; it combines classroom, moot court, and Second Circuit chambers work. She became a member of the Board of Trustees of Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
in 2006, concluding her term in 2011. In 2008, Sotomayor became a member of the Belizean Grove
Belizean Grove
The Belizean Grove is an elite, invitation-only American women's social club, located at 17 East 89th Street in New York City. Founded in 1999 by Susan Stautberg, a former Westinghouse Broadcasting executive, the Belizean Grove includes approximately 115 to 125 influential members from the...
, an invitation-only women's group modeled after the men's Bohemian Grove
Bohemian Grove
Bohemian Grove is a campground located at 20601 Bohemian Avenue, in Monte Rio, California, belonging to a private San Francisco-based men's art club known as the Bohemian Club...
. On June 19, 2009, Sotomayor resigned from the Belizean Grove after Republican politicians voiced concerns over the group's membership policy.
Sotomayor has maintained a public presence since joining the federal judiciary. She has given over 180 speeches since 1993, about half of which either focused on issues of ethnicity or gender or were delivered to minority or women's groups. Her speeches have tended to give a more defined picture of her worldview than her rulings on the bench. The themes of her speeches have often focused on ethnic identity and experience, the need for diversity, and America's struggle with the implications of its diverse makeup. She has also presented her career achievements as an example of the success of affirmative action
Affirmative action in the United States
In the United States, affirmative action refers to equal opportunity employment measures that Federal contractors and subcontractors are legally required to adopt. These measures are intended to prevent discrimination against employees or applicants for employment, on the basis of "color,...
policies in university admissions, saying "I am the perfect affirmative action baby" in regard to her belief that her admission test scores were not comparable to those of her classmates.
Sotomayor lives in Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
in New York City and has few financial assets other than her home. She enjoys shopping and travelling and giving gifts, and helps support her mother and her mother's husband in Florida. Regarding her short financial disclosure reports, she has said, "When you don't have money, it's easy. There isn't anything there to report." As a federal judge, she is entitled to a pension equal to her full salary upon retirement.
She continues to take daily insulin injections, but her diabetes is considered to be well controlled. Sotomayor does not belong to a Catholic parish
Parish (Catholic Church)
In the Roman Catholic Church, a parish is the lowest ecclesiastical geographical subdivision: from ecclesiastical province to diocese to deanery to parish.-Requirements:A parish needs two things under common law to become a parish...
or attend Mass
Mass (liturgy)
"Mass" is one of the names by which the sacrament of the Eucharist is called in the Roman Catholic Church: others are "Eucharist", the "Lord's Supper", the "Breaking of Bread", the "Eucharistic assembly ", the "memorial of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection", the "Holy Sacrifice", the "Holy and...
, but does attend church for important occasions.
She maintains ties with Puerto Rico, visiting once or twice a year, speaking there occasionally, and visiting cousins and other relatives who still live in the Mayagüez area
Mayagüez, Puerto Rico
Mayagüez is the eighth-largest municipality of Puerto Rico. Originally founded as "Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria" it is also known as "La Sultana del Oeste" , "Ciudad de las Aguas Puras" , or "Ciudad del Mangó"...
. She has long stressed her ethnic identity, saying in 1996, "Although I am an American, love my country and could achieve its opportunity of succeeding at anything I worked for, I also have a Latina soul and heart, with the magic that carries."
Sotomayor said of the years following her divorce, that "I have found it difficult to maintain a relationship while I've pursued my career." She has talked of herself as "emotionally withdrawn" and lacking "genuine happiness" when living by herself; after becoming a judge, she said she would not date lawyers. In 1997, she was engaged to New York construction contractor Peter White, but the relationship had ended by 2000.
In July 2010, Sotomayor signed a contract with Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...
to publish a memoir about the early part of her life. She is receiving an advance of nearly $1.2 million for the work.
Awards and honors
Sotomayor has received honorary law degrees from Lehman CollegeLehman College
Lehman College is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, USA. Founded in 1931 as the Bronx campus of Hunter College, the school became an independent college within the City University in 1968. The college is named after Herbert Lehman, a former New York governor,...
(1999), Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
(2001), Brooklyn Law School
Brooklyn Law School
Brooklyn Law School is a law school located in Brooklyn Heights, in Downtown Brooklyn, New York.-History:Founded in 1901 by William Payson Richardson and Norman P. Heffley, Brooklyn Law School was the first law school on Long Island. Using space provided by Heffley’s business school, the law...
(2001), Pace University School of Law
Pace University School of Law
Pace University School of Law, known colloquially as "Pace Law School", is the law school of Pace University, a comprehensive, independent, and diversified university with campuses in New York City and Westchester County...
(2003), Hofstra University
Hofstra University
Hofstra University is a private, nonsectarian institution of higher learning located in the Village of Hempstead, New York, United States, about east of New York City: less than an hour away by train or car...
(2006), Northeastern University School of Law
Northeastern University School of Law
Northeastern University School of Law is a law school in Boston, Massachusetts. From the time of its founding in 1898, the law school's mission has focused on addressing the needs of students and of society....
(2007), Howard University
Howard University
Howard University is a federally chartered, non-profit, private, coeducational, nonsectarian, historically black university located in Washington, D.C., United States...
(2010), and St. Lawrence University
St. Lawrence University
St. Lawrence University is a four-year liberal arts college located in the village of Canton in Saint Lawrence County, New York, United States. It has roughly 2300 undergraduate and 100 graduate students, about equally split between male and female....
(2010).
She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pa., is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,...
in 2002. She was given the Outstanding Latino Professional Award in 2006 by the Latino/a Law Students Association.
In June 2010, the Bronxdale Houses development, where Sotomayor grew up, was renamed after her. The Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses and Justice Sonia Sotomayor Community Center comprise 28 buildings with some 3,500 residents. While many New York housing developments are named after well-known people, this was only the second to be named after a former resident.
Publications
Articles- "Statehood and the Equal Footing Doctrine: The Case for Puerto Rican Seabed Rights", 88 Yale Law JournalYale Law JournalThe Yale Law Journal is a student-run law review affiliated with the Yale Law School. Published continuously since 1891, it is the most widely known of the eight law reviews published by students at Yale Law School...
825 (1979) - "Returning Majesty to the Law and Politics: A Modern Approach" (with Nicole A. Gordon), 30 Suffolk University Law ReviewSuffolk University Law ReviewThe Suffolk University Law Review is a law review or honor board published at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Massachusetts.-Organization:The journal was established in 1967 and publishes all of its articles in print form and online...
35 (1996) - "La Independencia Judicial: Que Necessitamos Para Conservarla" 60 Revista Colegio de Abogados de Puerto Rico 59 (1999)
Forewords
- "Foreword", The International Judge: An Introduction to the Men and Women Who Decide the World’s Cases by Daniel Terris, Cesare P. R. Romano, and Leigh Swigart, University Press of New EnglandUniversity Press of New EnglandThe University Press of New England , located in Lebanon, New Hampshire and founded in 1970, is a university press consortium including Brandeis University, Dartmouth College , the University of New Hampshire, and Northeastern University...
(2007)
Speeches
- "A Latina Judge’s Voice" (Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture), in symposium "Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation", Berkeley La Raza Law Journal (Spring 2002)
- “Tribute to John Sexton” 60 NYU Annual Survey of American LawNYU Annual Survey of American LawThe New York University Annual Survey of American Law is a student-edited law journal at New York University School of Law.- Mission :...
23 (2004)
See also
- List of famous Puerto Ricans
- Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United StatesDemographics of the Supreme Court of the United StatesThe demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States encompass the gender, ethnic, religious, geographic, and economic backgrounds of the 112 justices appointed to the Supreme Court. Certain of these characteristics have been raised as an issue since the Court was established in 1789. For its...
- List of Roman Catholic United States Supreme Court justices
- Bill Clinton judicial appointment controversies
- George W. Bush judicial appointment controversiesGeorge W. Bush judicial appointment controversiesDuring President George W. Bush's two term tenure in office, he nominated thirty-nine people for twenty-seven different federal appellate judgeships that were blocked by the Senate Democrats either directly in the Senate Judiciary Committee or on the full Senate floor using a filibuster....
- Barack Obama Supreme Court candidatesBarack Obama Supreme Court candidatesPresident Barack Obama has made two successful appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States. The first was that of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Associate Justice David H. Souter. Sotomayor was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 6,...
External links
- Sonia Sotomayor Photo Gallery from The White House website
- Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court – Sonia Sotomayor – Questionnaire materials given to Senate Judiciary Committee
- CV from Pace UniversityPace UniversityPace University is an American private, co-educational, and comprehensive multi-campus university in the New York metropolitan area with campuses in New York City and Westchester County, New York.-Programs:...
2003 Commencement - ABA Profile, National Hispanic Heritage Month 2000
- SCOTUSBlog: Judge Sotomayor's Appellate Opinions in Civil Cases
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