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Sonia Sotomayor Biography & Facts

Sonia Maria Sotomayor (, Spanish: [ˈsonja sotomaˈʝoɾ]; born June 25, 1954) is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009, and has served since August 8, 2009. She is the third woman, first nonwhite woman, the first Hispanic and the first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court. Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1976 and received her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. Sotomayor worked as an assistant district attorney in New York for four and a half 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; confirmation followed in 1992. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her appointment to the court of appeals was slowed by the Republican majority in the United States Senate because of their concerns that the position might lead to a Supreme Court nomination 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 to the Supreme Court following the retirement of Justice David Souter. Her nomination was confirmed by the Senate in August 2009 by a vote of 68–31. While on the Court, Sotomayor has supported the informal liberal bloc of justices when they divide along the commonly perceived ideological lines. During her Supreme Court tenure, Sotomayor has been identified with concern for the rights of criminal defendants and criminal justice reform, and is known for her impassioned dissents on issues of race and ethnic identity, including in Schuette v. BAMN, Utah v. Strieff, and Trump v. Hawaii. Early life Sotomayor was born in the New York City borough of the Bronx. Her father was Juan Sotomayor (c. 1921–1964), from the area of Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and her mother was Celina Báez (1927–2021), an orphan from Santa Rosa in Lajas, a rural area on Puerto Rico's southwest coast. The two left Puerto Rico separately, met, and married during World War II after Celina served in the Women's Army Corps. Juan Sotomayor had a third-grade education, did not speak English, and worked as a tool and die worker; Celina Baez worked as a telephone operator and then a practical nurse. Sonia's younger brother, Juan Sotomayor (born c. 1957), later became a physician and university professor in the Syracuse, New York, area. Sotomayor was raised a Catholic and grew up in Puerto Rican communities in the South Bronx and East Bronx; she calls herself a "Nuyorican". The family lived in a South Bronx tenement before moving in 1957 to the well-maintained, racially and ethnically mixed, working-class Bronxdale Houses housing project in Soundview (which has over time been thought as part of both the East Bronx and South Bronx). In 2010, the Bronxdale Houses were renamed in her honor. 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 grew up with an alcoholic father and a mother who was emotionally distant; she felt closest to her grandmother, who she later said gave her a source of "protection and purpose". Sonia was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age seven, 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. Despite the distance between the two, which became greater after her father's death and which was not fully reconciled until decades later, 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 and a hospital. Sotomayor passed the entrance tests for and then attended Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor was on the forensics team and was elected to the student government. She graduated as valedictorian in 1972. 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. College and law school Sotomayor attended Princeton University. She has said she was admitted in part due to her achievements in high school and in part because affirmative action made up for her standardized test scores, which she described as "not comparable to her colleagues at Princeton and Yale." She would later say that there are cultural biases built into such testing and praised affirmative action for fulfilling "its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run." Sotomayor described her time at Princeton as life-changing. Initially, she felt like "a visitor landing in an alien country" coming from the Bronx and Puerto Rico. Princeton had few female students and fewer Latinos (about twenty). She was too intimidated to ask questions during her freshman year; her writing and vocabulary skills were weak and she lacked knowledge in the classics. She put in long hours in the library and worked over summers with a professor outside of class, and gained skills, knowledge and confidence. She became a moderate student activist and co-chair of the Acción Puertorriqueña organization, which served as a social and political hub and sought more opportunities for Puerto Rican students. She .... Discover the Sonia Sotomayor popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Sonia Sotomayor books.