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 U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. Her father died when she was nine years old, and she was subsequently raised by her mother. She graduated with high honors from Princeton University in 1976 and received her Juris Doctor in 1979 from Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She 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.
President George H. W. Bush nominated Sotomayor to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1991; she was confirmed in 1992. In 1997, President Bill Clinton nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. That appointment was slowed by the Republican majority in the United States Senate because of its concerns that the position might lead to a Supreme Court nomination, but she was 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 Obama nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court following Justice David Souter's retirement. 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, as demonstrated in majority opinions such as J. D. B. v. North Carolina and Glossip v. Oklahoma. She is also known for her impassioned dissents on issues of race and ethnic identity, including in Schuette v. BAMN, Utah v. Strieff, and Trump v. Hawaii.
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 Báez worked as a telephone operator and then a practical nurse. Sonia's younger brother, Juan Sotomayor, became a physician and university professor in the Syracuse, New York, area.
Sotomayor was raised Catholic and grew up in Puerto Rican communities in the South Bronx and East Bronx; she has called 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.
Sotomayor grew up with an alcoholic father and an emotionally distant mother; she felt closest to her grandmother, who she later said was a source of "protection and purpose". Sotomayor 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 that, she became fluent in English. 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. She has said that she was first inspired by the strong-willed children's book detective character Nancy Drew, but, after her diabetes diagnosis led her doctors to suggest a different career path, she was inspired by the TV series Perry Mason to pursue a legal career and become a judge. 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."
Sotomayor passed the entrance tests for and then attended Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. At Cardinal Spellman, she was on the forensics team (an American public-speaking competition) 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.
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 said were "not comparable to her colleagues at Princeton and Yale". She later said 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 has described her time at Princeton as life-changing. Initially, she felt like "a visitor landing in an alien country". Princeton had few female students and fewer Latinos (about 20). 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 worked in the admissions office, traveling to high schools and lobbying on behalf of her best prospects.
As a student activist, Sotomayor focused on faculty hiring and curriculum, since Princeton did not have a single full-time Latino professor nor any class on Latin American studies. A meeting with university president William G. Bowen in her sophomore year saw no results, with Sotomayor telling a New York Times reporter at the time, "Princeton is following a policy of benign neutrality and is not making substantive efforts to change." She also wrote opinion pieces for the Daily Princetonian addressing those issues. In April 1974, Acción Puertorriqueña filed a formal letter of complaint with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, saying the school discriminated in its hiring and admission practices. The university began to hire Latino faculty, and Sotomayor established an ongoing dialogue with Bowen.
Sotomayor also persuaded professor Peter Winn, who specialized in Latin American history, to create a seminar on Puerto Rican history and politics. She joined the governance board of Princeton's Third World Center and served on the university's student–faculty Discipline Committee, which issued rulings on student infractions. She also ran an after-school program for local children and volunteered as an interpreter for Latino patients at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital.