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Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition

Sonia Sotomayor

by Scott A. Merriman,

Supreme Court Justice (2009-present)

Born: June 25, 1954

Area of Achievement: Law, social issues

Sotomayor is the first Hispanic-American Supreme Court justice. She started her life in the housing projects of New York City but went on to attend Yale Law School and become a federal district and circuit court judge, before being nominated to the nation’s highest court.

Early Life

Sonia Sotomayor (SOH-toh-mah-YOHR) was born into a working-class household to her Puerto Rican-born parents. Her father died at a young age, and her mother greatly stressed the importance of education. Sotomayor’s mother pushed both her and her brother Juan to do well in school, and both did, with Juan becoming a doctor. Sotomayor went to parochial schools for her elementary days and then attended the well-known high school Cardinal Spellman. She finished there as the valedictorian and was accepted into Princeton University.

Sotomayor struggled at Princeton, in part because she felt out of her element and in part because she had not been exposed to some of the things that Princeton took for granted, such as discussion of ancient literature. It did not help that Sotomayor found the whole experience overwhelming. Overcoming her anxiety, she asked for extra help and challenged the marginalization of Latin American culture at the university. She soon began to improve and ultimately won an award as the top undergraduate. Sotomayor had been interested in the law since an early age, and so she turned her attention to law school.

Sonia Sotomayor (Wikimedia Commons)

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Sotomayor decided to attend Yale Law School and was awarded a scholarship. She was mentored by Yale’s general counsel (who also taught at the law school), which was very beneficial. She graduated in 1979 and then moved to New York City, joining the bar in 1980. Sotomayor joined the New York County District Attorney’s Office and moved up the ladder to prosecute felonies. In 1983, she left that office, formed her own law firm, and finally joined a corporate law firm to gain experience in civil law.

Sotomayor had made quite an impression upon her boss at the New York County’s District Attorney’s Office and he recommended her to be on several public agencies and panels. From this background, she came to the attention of New York’s Democratic senator at the time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had an agreement with his Republican colleague allowing Moynihan to select some of the district judgeships even though there was a Republican in the White House. Unlike Sotomayor’s later confirmation hearings, these early hearings were without controversy, and she was unanimously approved.

Life’s Work

Sotomayor’s real work began once she was a district court judge. She was a bit unusual on the district court bench for a number of reasons. She was one of only a handful of women in her judicial circuit, and she was the first Puerto Rican woman to serve on the federal district bench at all. She did not want to gain attention for the wrong reasons, but did have some well-known cases come through her courtroom. Those included the 1994 Major League Baseball strike, in which she issued a preliminary injunction that had the effect of ending the strike. She also ruled to allow TheWall Street Journal to print White House counsel Vince Foster’s suicide note in 1993.

After five years on the district court bench, President Bill Clinton selected Sotomayor for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. While little in her background caused controversy, even in 1997 some observers thought that Sotomayor was being groomed for the Supreme Court. Thus, certain senators were quite probing of the judge in her confirmation hearings. The vote on her nomination was delayed and did not occur until sixteen months after her nomination.

Sotomayor’s Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings

Sonia Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court in May, 2009, and her confirmation hearings began in July. Some of the delay was attributed to scheduling issues and the fact that Sotomayor met a number of the senators in one-on-one meetings. Ideological lines formed somewhat predictably. Democrats favored her (Sotomayor was nominated by a Democratic president, Barack Obama), while Republicans argued that she was an “activist judge.” In the hearings, the Republicans focused on a comment Sotomayor had made after a 2001 speech in which she suggested that a “wise Latina woman” had a distinct advantage in deciding a case over a white man who lacked similar life experiences. Sotomayor defended her comment as an attempt to inspire her audience (she was giving a lecture on diversity at the University of California at Berkeley) and as a rhetorical device, and linked her words to a quote by Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female Supreme Court justice.

After joining the Second Circuit, Sotomayor wrote nearly four hundred majority opinions and was widely viewed as a centrist judge. Several of her opinions and some opinions in which she joined the majority drew attention either at the time or later during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings. These include a case in which the court upheld a state ban on nunchucks and another concerning affirmative action, in which Sotomayor voted with the majority to allow a city to retry a promotion board when not enough minorities were promoted. She drew the notice of football fans in 2004 when she overturned a lower court ruling and held that the National Football League was allowed to ban college running back Maurice Clarett from the draft because he did not meet the league’s age requirement.

Besides serving as a district and circuit court of appeals judge, Sotomayor also taught at New York University School of law and Columbia Law School. Her decade of service on the circuit court of appeals, while shorter than that of some justices, is comparable to that of Justice Clarence Thomas and longer than the circuit court tenures of some other current justices, including Antonin Scalia.

“I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.”

Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court when Justice David Souter stepped down in 2009. She was confirmed after a somewhat testy confirmation hearing. While on the court, she generally has voted with its liberal wing and thus has not varied much from her predecessor. She has, however, been very active in asking questions from the bench, something that other newly appointed justices sometimes have avoided early in their tenures.

Sotomayor also was questioned about several cases, including one in which she ruled against white firefighters in a reverse discrimination case; her decision was notable, as it had been overruled by the Supreme Court just days before her hearings. Sotomayor defended her decision as being correct based on the precedents in effect at the time. The full Senate ultimately confirmed her appointment by a vote of 68-31.

As a justice, Sotomayor’s rulings and opinions have been used to strike down controversial anti-immigration legislation, and Sotomayor’s ruling in the United States v. Jones case of 2013 was used to justify federal rulings against the federal collection of digital data. Sotomayor and the court’s other two female justices were the dissenting minority in the case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby in which the court ruled that private companies could cite religious beliefs in denying employees certain type of health benefits. Sotomayor published a memoir of her life, My Beloved World, in 2013, which received critical praise.

Significance

Sotomayor is significant as the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court and one of the few justices who rose from poverty to the high court. Her appointment makes her the third woman on the court and one of the relatively few modern-era justices who have served in all three levels of the federal judiciary (district court, circuit court of appeals, and Supreme Court). None of the justices she joined on the high court has that distinction. Sotomayor has received numerous honorary doctorate degrees during her career, including degrees from Princeton, Yale, Howard, and New York University. Princeton University awarded her the Woodrow Wilson Award for civic service in 2013.

Further Reading

1 

Felix, Antonia. Sonia Sotomayor: The True American Dream. New York: Berkley, 2010. Relates how Sotomayor became a Supreme Court justice and discusses her background, including her childhood in poverty in New York City.

2 

McElroy, Lisa Tucker. Sonia Sotomayor: First Hispanic U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Minneapolis, Minn.: Lerner, 2010. Although aimed at a relatively young audience, this biography covers all the pertinent topics. Very readable and accessible.

3 

Salkin, Patricia E., ed. Pioneering Women Lawyers: From Kate Stoneman to the Present. Chicago: American Bar Association, 2009. Stoneman was the first female lawyer in New York in 1886 and Albany Law School hosts a symposium in her honor. This work collects speeches given there on a wide variety of female pioneers in law, including some judges.

4 

Sotomayor, Sonia. My Beloved World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Chronicles Sotomayor’s early life and education up until 1992. Avoids discussion of her legal philosophy or politics, focuses more on her personal and professional life.

5 

Terris, Daniel, Cesare Roman, and Leigh Swigart. The International Judge: An Introduction to the Men and Women Who Decide the World’s Cases. Foreword by Sonio Sotomayor. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis, 2007. This introduction to those who try the world’s cases includes a foreword by Sotomayor and profiles of some of the judges.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Merriman,, Scott A. "Sonia Sotomayor." Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition, edited by D. Alan Dean, Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AmHero_0222.
APA 7th
Merriman,, S. A. (2019). Sonia Sotomayor. In D. Alan Dean (Ed.), Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Merriman,, Scott A. "Sonia Sotomayor." Edited by D. Alan Dean. Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2019. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.