Sonia Sotomayor’s parents immigrated to New York from Puerto Rico. She has overcome personal obstacles. She has suffered from diabetes since age 8 and lost her father at age 9. She is divorced with no children.
She graduated Princeton University and Yale Law School. She served as a prosecutor and an attorney in private practice. Sotomayor became a federal judge for the Southern District of New York in 1992 and an appeals judge in 1998 for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers New York, Vermont and Connecticut.
At her Senate confirmation hearing more than a decade ago, she said, “I don’t believe we should bend the Constitution under any circumstance. It says what it says. We should do honor to it.”
Sotomayor has ruled on two high profile cases. In 1995, she issued the preliminary injunction against Major League Baseball which ended the 1994 Baseball Strike. Sotomayor made a ruling allowing the Wall Street Journal to publish Vince Foster’s suicide note. In 1997, she was nominated by Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. After more than a year, she was confirmed and joined the court in 1998. Sotomayor was an Adjunct Professor at New York University School of Law from 1998 to 2007 and has been a lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School since 1999.
Prior to her selection by Obama, Sotomayor had been considered by both Democrat and Republican presidents as a Supreme Court candidate. In 2005, Senate Democrats suggested Sotomayor as a nominee to George W. Bush, who eventually selected Samuel A. Alito, Jr. Prior to Souter’s retirement announcement, there was speculation that Sotomayor was a potential nominee. After Souter’s retirement announcement was leaked to the press, Sotomayor received attention as a possible nominee, and in May 2009 reports had Sotomayor on a shortlist of possible nominees. On May 26, 2009, Obama nominated Sotomayor to the court. If confirmed, she would be the court’s first Latina justice (and the second Ibero-American justice, after Benjamin N. Cardozo).