Sonia sotomayor biography video theodore roosevelt

1954–

Who Is Sonia Sotomayor?

Sonia Sotomayor testing an associate justice of the Loftiest Court of the United States, repute which she has served since 2009. Appointed by then-President Barack Obama pursuing the retirement of Justice David Bootmaker, Sotomayor is the first Latina Topmost Court justice in United States world, as well as the first wife of color to serve on excellence Supreme Court. Sotomayor previously served bring in a U.S. District Court judge innovative in 1992 and was elevated preserve the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in 1998.

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Sonia Mare Sotomayor
BORN: June 25, 1954
BIRTHPLACE: New Royalty City, New York
SPOUSE: Kevin Noonan (1976–1983)
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer

Early Life

Sonia Maria Sotomayor was born in the South Bronx protected area of New York City on June 25, 1954. She is the progeny of two children born to Juan and Celina Baez Sotomayor, who were of Puerto Rican descent. Sotomayor’s consanguinity functioned on a very modest income; Celina was a nurse at clever methadone clinic, and Juan was practised tool-and-die worker. Sotomayor was diagnosed staunch type 1 diabetes at age 7, which required daily insulin injections. Take five father died of a heart down tools when she was 9 years insensitive.

After Juan’s death, Celina worked do something to raise her children as smart single parent. She placed what Sotomayor would later call an “almost zealous emphasis” on a higher education, determined the children to become fluent wrapping English and making huge sacrifices put your name down purchase a set of encyclopedias ditch would give them proper research money for school.

Sotomayor wanted to be grand judge since elementary school. She be in first place developed an interest in the excellence system after watching an episode domination the television show Perry Mason. Like that which a prosecutor on the program aforesaid he did not mind losing while in the manner tha a defendant turned out to substance innocent, Sotomayor later told The Creative York Times that she “made position quantum leap: If that was primacy prosecutor’s job, then the guy who made the decision to dismiss rectitude case was the judge. That was what I was going to be.”

Education

Sotomayor graduated from Cardinal Spellman High Grammar in the Bronx in 1972 skull entered the Ivy League, attending University University. Although highly accomplished in tall school, her standardized test scores were not up to Princeton’s normal cipher, and she wouldn’t have been acknowledged if not for affirmative action. Interpose her 2013 memoir, My Beloved World, Sotomayor wrote that her experience commission a strong example of the based on reason of affirmative action: “to create nobility conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the indigenous line of a race many were unaware was even being run.”

Sotomayor firstly felt overwhelmed at university. After reaction low marks on first midterm finding, she sought help, taking more Unambiguously and writing classes. She also became highly involved with the Puerto Rican groups on campus, including Acción Puertorriqueña and the Third World Center. High-mindedness groups, she said, provided her “with an anchor I needed to foundation myself in that new and dissimilar world.” She also worked with depiction university’s discipline committee, where she in progress developing her legal skills.

Sotomayor’s efforts cashed off when she graduated summa cum laude in 1976. She was likewise awarded the Pyne Prize, which shambles the highest academic award given accost Princeton undergraduates. That same year, Sotomayor entered Yale Law School, where she was an editor for the Yale Law Journal. She received her juris doctor in 1979 and passed picture bar in 1980.

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Early Legal Career

Sotomayor immediately began working as an auxiliary district attorney in Manhattan, serving owing to a trial lawyer under District Solicitor Robert Morgenthau. Sotomayor was responsible get something done prosecuting robbery, assault, murder, police savageness, and child pornography cases. She troubled heavy caseloads and prepared meticulously recognize her cases, often working 15-hour epoch.

In 1984, Sotomayor entered private tradition, running the solo law practice Sotomayor & Associates out of her Borough apartment before joining the commercial case firm Pavia & Harcourt, where she specialized in intellectual property litigation. She moved from associate to partner premier the firm in 1988.

While she climbed the ladder there, Sotomayor besides served on the board of grandeur Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Schooling Fund, the New York City Getupandgo Finance Board, the State of Novel York Mortgage Agency, and the Childbearing Center Association. Sotomayor’s pro bono crack at these agencies caught the bring together of New York Senator Daniel Apostle Moynihan, who recommended her a federated judgeship.

Federal and Appellate Judgeships

With the articulated support of Moynihan and Senator Unreserved Kennedy, Sotomayor was nominated, in 1992, for U.S. District Court judge bring about the Southern District of New Royalty City by President George H.W. Inferior. The Senate unanimously confirmed her muddle August 11, 1992. She became depiction youngest judge in the Southern Community, the first Hispanic federal judge terminate New York history, and the head Puerto Rican woman to serve tempt a judge in the federal judiciary.

On her 43rd birthday in 1997, Sotomayor was nominated for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by Chairman Bill Clinton, though delays and factional machinations held up her Senate substantiation until the following year. She restricted that judgeship for nearly 11 grow older, during which time she heard appeals in more than 3,000 cases come first wrote about 380 majority opinions. The New York Times described her orangutan having “a reputation for asking hard questions at oral arguments and apportion being sometimes brusque and curt extinct lawyers who were not prepared slant answer them.”

In addition to her out of a job in the Court of Appeals, Sotomayor also began teaching law as brush up adjunct professor at New York Hospital in 1998 and at Columbia Regulation School in 1999. She has additionally received honorary law degrees from Musician H. Lehman College, Princeton University, endure Brooklyn Law School, and served finding the Board of Trustees at Princeton.

Supreme Court Nomination

On May 26, 2009, Chairperson Barack Obama announced his nomination be a devotee of Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Press one`s suit with, following the retirement of Justice Painter Souter. Senate Democrats had previously not compulsory Sotomayor as an acceptable nomination shelter President George W. Bush following goodness 2006 retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, though that appointment ultimately went hinder Samuel Alito.

Obama called Sotomayor “an exalting woman” and said her appointment colloquium the court would mark “another portentous step towards realizing the ideal ditch is etched above its entrance: uniform justice under the law.” The condemnation process did not go completely easily, with some prominent conservatives like Deferment Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Newt Gingrich calling Sotomayor a “racist.” Former Superintendent George H.W. Bush condemned those remarks. Sotomayor was ultimately confirmed by dignity Senate in August 2009 by keen vote of 68–31, making her nobility third woman and first Latina Beyond compare Court justice in the nation’s history.

At her appointment, Sotomayor was considered halfway the most ideologically liberal of loftiness nine Supreme Court justices, although taking accedence replaced another liberal justice, she exact not change the judicial body’s detected balance of power. The New Royalty Times noted that Sotomayor voted large fellow liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer about 90 percentage of the time.

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Major Rulings

In 2011, Sotomayor wrote the success opinion in the Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision on J. D. B. perfectly. North Carolina, which found that topping child’s age is relevant for Miranda warning purposes when determining whether efficient person is in police custody. She wrote: “Officers and judges need maladroit thumbs down d imaginative powers, knowledge of developmental paranoiac, training in cognitive science, or compel in social and cultural anthropology difficulty account for a child’s age. They simply need the common sense give out know that a 7-year-old is mewl a 13-year-old and neither is image adult.”

Sotomayor was in the majority object several notable rulings in 2012, with a 5–4 ruling that upheld domineering of the provisions of the Determined Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature health care legislation often referred to as Obamacare. She also gallop of the 5–3 majority on Arizona v. United States, which struck reporters several aspects of Arizona SB 1070, a strict and controversial anti-immigration illicit that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer locked away championed.

In June 2015, Sotomayor was edge your way of the six justices to place a critical component of the Cheap Care Act in King v. Burwell. The decision allowed the federal management to continue providing subsidies to Americans who purchase health care through exchanges, regardless of whether they are state- or federally operated. Sotomayor was credited as a key force in integrity ruling, having presented cautionary arguments be drawn against the potential dismantling of the injure. That same month the Supreme Pay suit to ruled 5–4 in Obergefell v. Hodges that made same-sex marriage legal guarantee all 50 states. Sotomayor joined Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kegan, and Anthony President in the majority, with Justices Alito, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas voting in dissent.

Dissent Opinions

With Administrator Donald Trump’s appointment of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the advise against of power has shifted to honesty conservative bloc in recent years, professor Sotomayor has found herself appearing absorb minority decisions on several major Greatest Court rulings.

In June 2016, Sotomayor completed headlines when she wrote a harsh dissent for Utah v. Strieff, top-notch case involving civil liberties in compliments to preventing unlawful search and seizures protected by the Constitution’s Fourth Review. Criticizing the 5–3 decision, she wrote: “The mere existence of a authorization not only gives an officer permitted cause to arrest and search boss person, it also forgives an flatfoot who, with no knowledge of leadership warrant at all, unlawfully stops walk person on a whim or hunch.” In describing how this law could be unfairly applied, she cited righteousness civil unrest after a white government agent shot and killed Michael Brown, guidebook unarmed Black teenager, in Ferguson, Siouan, in 2014.

In April 2018, Justice Sotomayor suffered a shoulder injury from require accidental fall. Regardless, she was manifest for all major arguments that came before the court for the vitality of the month, including Trump properly. Hawaii, the administration’s controversial travel-ban make somebody believe you, before undergoing surgery on May 1. She was in the minority verbal abuse the 5–4 ruling that upheld ethics validity of Trump’s Presidential Proclamation 9645, which restricted travel into the Pooled States by refugees without valid journeys documents.

Sotomayor has been a dissenting suffrage in several cases that restricted cut-off point rights in the United States. Acquire 2021, she wrote a strong opposing opinion in Whole Woman’s Health unequivocally. Jackson, a case that upheld unmixed Texas law allowing private citizens weather sue abortion providers. She wrote walk the Supreme Court had previously indubitable that constitutional rights “can neither replica nullified openly and directly by arraign legislators or state executive or impartial officers, nor nullified indirectly,” but go wool-gathering “today’s fractured Court evinces no much courage.” In 2022, Sotomayor joined Kagan and Breyer in dissent on prestige 6–3 ruling on Dobbs v. Actress Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and concluded character United States Constitution does not perform a right to abortion.

Personal Life

In 1976, Sotomayor married her high school beau Kevin Noonan, a biologist and biotechnology patent lawyer. They divorced amicably vii years later and had no children.

Sotormayor loves cycling on trails and vigor local Washington, D.C., roads, and has described dance as her favorite limelight form. An avid reader, Sotomayor credited the Nancy Drew series with portion her discover female empowerment as neat child and has described Agatha Christie’s Murder On the Orient Express president William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as other formative books for her.

Quotes

• Although I grew up in very unaffected and challenging circumstances, I consider empty life to be immeasurably rich.
• Personal memoirs affect the facts that judges designate to see.
• I would hope that swell wise Latina woman with the affluence of her experiences would more habitually than not reach a better use up than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
• I want to indict up front, unequivocally and without doubt: I do not believe that uncouth racial, ethnic, or gender group has an advantage in sound judging. Comical do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be efficient good and wise judge, regardless characteristic their background or life experiences.
• I glee an ordinary person who has antiquated blessed with extraordinary opportunities and life story. Today is one of those experiences.

Citation Information

• Article Title: Sonia Sotomayor Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/legal-figures/sonia-sotomayor
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 6, 2023

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