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The 2000s in America

Sotomayor, Sonia

by Elizabeth Adams

Identification: American supreme court justice

Born: June 25, 1954; New York, New York

The first Hispanic justice to serve on the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor was sworn in on August 8, 2009. Prior to her appointment as associate justice, Sotomayor worked as an attorney and circuit judge.

Sonia Sotomayor was born and raised in the Bronx, a borough of New York City. After graduating from Cardinal Spellman High School as valedictorian, Sotomayor attended Princeton University. She graduated summa cum laude in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in history. She went on to enroll in Yale Law School, where she served as editor of the Yale Law Journal and managing editor of Yale Studies in World Public Order (now titled the Yale Journal of International Law).

Sotomayor began her career as an attorney following her graduation from Yale in 1979. She worked for Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney of Manhattan, and in 1984 began working at a private law firm in New York, Pavia and Harcourt, where she switched from criminal to civil law. Three years later, she was appointed to the State of New York Mortgage Agency, a group that helped low-income people attain mortgages and insurance, by New York governor Mario Cuomo. From 1988 until 1992, Sotomayor served on the New York City Campaign Finance Board, to which she was appointed by the city’s mayor, Ed Koch.

Sonia Sotomayor

AUGHTS_SotomayorSonia.jpg

(Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States/Photograph by Steve Petteway)

Judge

In 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Sotomayor for a US District Court judgeship in Manhattan. She was appointed in 1992, becoming the first Hispanic federal judge in the state of New York. In 1997, President Bill Clinton nominated So tomayor for a judgeship with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. After her nomination, Republicans alleged she was too liberal and that she was being groomed for the US Supreme Court. Despite these objections, Sotomayor was confirmed as circuit judge in October 1998 in a Senate vote of 67 to 29 after a year-long confirmation process.

During her eleven-year tenure as a circuit judge, Sotomayor wrote over 380 majority opinions. Five of her opinions were later reviewed by the Supreme Court. Of the five, three were overturned, including her ruling in Correctional Services Corporation v. Malesko, in which Sotomayor determined that an inmate who had sustained injuries at a halfway house could sue the private contractor he deemed responsible. Also overturned was Entergy Corp. v. Riverkeeper Inc., in which Sotomayor found that cost-benefit analyses could not be used by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine the best methods through which power plants could draw cooling water. Of the five reviewed, two were upheld: Empire Healthchoice Assurance, Inc. v. McVeigh and Knight v. Commissioner.

Supreme Court Justice

In April 2009, members of the press discovered that Supreme Court Justice David Souter was planning to retire in the summer of that year. By May of 2009, it was widely speculated that President Barack Obama would nominate Sotomayor to replace him. Obama nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court on May 26, 2009.

In light of the Supreme Court nomination, Sotomayor faced criticism for her number of Supreme Court reversals, which increased in the summer of 2009 when her decision as part of a panel of judges in Ricci v. DeStefano went before the US Supreme Court. In this case, a group of white firefighters from New Haven, Connecticut, alleged racial discrimination as a result of the city’s decision not to use test scores as a basis for promotions, which had been the primary intention behind the test. No African American firefighters had scored well enough on the test to qualify for a promotion, and only two Hispanic firefighters’ test scores had qualified them; the city therefore disregarded the test results in an attempt to avoid a lawsuit alleging that the test itself was discriminatory. Sotomayor and the other judges on the panel upheld the ruling of the original court, which had ruled in favor of the city. However, the US Supreme Court overturned the panel’s decision.

Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee began in July 2009. On August 6, 2009, her nomination was confirmed in a vote of 68 to 31. She was sworn in two days later, becoming the third female justice in the history of the court. She also became the first Hispanic judge in the court’s history, and her appointment marked the first time that six out of the nine Supreme Court justices were Roman Catholics.

Impact

During her tenure as associate justice, Sotomayor was involved in a number of significant court cases, including Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Berghuis v. Thompkins, and Arizona v. United States. She received numerous awards and honors as well as honorary law degrees from Princeton and New York University and has been inducted into the prestigious American Philosophical Society.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Adams, Elizabeth. "Sotomayor, Sonia." The 2000s in America, edited by Craig Belanger, Salem Press, 2013. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=2000_0347.

APA 7th

Adams, E. (2013). Sotomayor, Sonia. In C. Belanger (Ed.), The 2000s in America. Salem Press.

CMOS 17th

Adams, Elizabeth. "Sotomayor, Sonia." Edited by Craig Belanger. The 2000s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2013. Accessed September 18, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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