Sonia Sotomayor

Supreme Court Justice

• Born: June 25, 1954
• Place of Birth: Bronx, New York

Sonia Sotomayor is an associate justice on the US Supreme Court. 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. She is the first Hispanic person to attain that position.

Early Life

Sonia Maria Sotomayor was born into a working-class household to Puerto Rican–born parents. Her father, Juan, died when Sotomayor was nine years old, and her mother, Celina, 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 after her graduation in 1976. That same year, she married high school sweetheart Kevin Edward Noonan, from whom she was later divorced in 1983.

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 the Wall 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.

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 people of color 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 justices, including Antonin Scalia.

Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court when Justice David Souter stepped down in 2009. She was confirmed after a somewhat testy confirmation hearing.

Sotomayor 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.

While on the court, Sotomayor 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. She has likewise written several separate opinions or dissents, which other newcomers have also often eschewed. In fact, between 2009 and 2013, Sotomayor penned eleven concurrences, as well as fourteen opinions and fifteen dissents.

Defense of civil liberties and protection from discrimination have been hallmarks of Sotomayor's tenure. She has defended Fourth Amendment rights against searches, including those conducted based on police misunderstanding of the law and those of suspects' cell phones without warrant. In gay-rights cases, Sotomayor voted against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which denied benefits to same-sex couples. During her tenure, the court has also heard cases on alleged racial gerrymandering, differential treatment of pregnant workers, housing credits and minority neighborhoods, and hiring refusal based on religious accommodation; in each Sotomayor sided with the majority in its antidiscrimination opinion. The year 2014 saw one of Sotomayor's most acerbic dissents in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, a case where the majority voted against affirmative action in Michigan's state college admissions process. Some observers viewed her dissent as a strong attack on the largely conservative court's longstanding philosophy of "colorblindness" toward race relations.

Another of Sotomayor's prominent dissents happened in Utah v. Streiff (2016), about the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule. In 2018, she dissented against the majority ruling in Trump v. Hawaii, which stated that President Donald Trump's presidential proclamation restricting travel into the US from several—predominantly Muslim—countries was legal and within the president's powers. Sotomayor argued in her dissent that the decision failed to safeguard the principle of religious freedom and compared the ruling to that of Korematsu v. United States (1944), which justified President Franklin Roosevelt's establishment of Japanese internment camps during World War II by executive order.

As divisions on the Supreme Court became increasingly pronounced during the 2020s, Sotomayor grew more vocal in her frustration with the conservative direction of the court. She was heavily critical of the majority opinions in her dissents of several high-profile cases, including the landmark decisions issued in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022; Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), which struck down affirmative action policies in college admissions; and the 2024 case related to immigration law, Department of State v. Muñoz. In the latter case, Sotomayor issued a warning that the Supreme Court was likely to overturn other protections for marriage equality in the future, including those protecting same-sex marriages.

In 2013, Sotomayor published a well-received memoir titled My Beloved World, in which she revealed a great deal of personal family history, including how the prognosis for her type-1 diabetes motivated her to studiousness and greater ambition. Her second memoir, Turning Pages: My Life Story, followed in 2018.

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 had that distinction.

The extroverted, popular Sotomayor has had more of a public presence outside the court than her colleagues, making her "the people's justice." She has had a fairly liberal track record and is known for her passionate defense of civil liberties and the rights of people of color and LGBTQ people. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2019.

Bibliography

Felix, Antonia. Sonia Sotomayor: The True American Dream. Berkley, 2010.

Jane, Talia. "Sotomayor Issues Dire Warning on Supreme Court Ruling on Noncitizens." The New Republic, 21 June 2024, newrepublic.com/post/182960/supreme-court-sotomayor-non-citizens-marriage-munoz-obergefell. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

McElroy, Lisa Tucker. Sonia Sotomayor: First Hispanic U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Lerner, 2010.

Salkin, Patricia E., ed. Pioneering Women Lawyers: From Kate Stoneman to the Present. American Bar Association, 2009.

"Sonia Sotomayor." Ballotpedia, ballotpedia.org/Sonia‗Sotomayor. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Sotomayor, Sonia. "Justice Sotomayor Prefers 'Sonia from the Bronx.'" 60 Minutes. CBS Interactive, 29 Jan. 2013. Web. 24 Sept. 2015.

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. Brandeis, 2007.