Sonia Sotomayor

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 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".

Education

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.

Early legal career

On Cabranes's recommendation, Sotomayor was hired out of law school as an assistant district attorney under New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, starting in 1979. She said at the time that she took the job with mixed emotions: "There was a tremendous amount of pressure from my community, from the third-world community, at Yale. They could not understand why I was taking this job. I'm not sure I've ever resolved that problem."

During that time, New York had visible drug problems, and Morgenthau's staff was prosecuting many crimes. Like other rookie prosecutors, Sotomayor was initially apprehensive about appearing before judges. Working in the trial division, she prosecuted a variety of cases, including shoplifting, prostitution, robberies, assaults, and murders. She also worked on cases involving police brutality.

In the courtroom, she was effective at cross-examination and at simplifying a case in ways juries could understand. In 1983, she helped convict Richard Maddicks (the "Tarzan Murderer"), who acrobatically entered apartments, robbed them, and shot residents. She felt lower-level crimes were largely products of environment and poverty but had a different attitude about serious felonies: "No matter how liberal I am, I'm still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous." Hispanic-on-Hispanic crime was a particular concern: "The saddest crimes for me were the ones that my own people committed against each other."

In general, Sotomayor expressed a passion for law and order. She worked 15-hour days and gained a reputation for drive, preparedness, and fairness. One performance review called her a "potential superstar". Morgenthau later described her as "smart, hard-working, [and having] a lot of common sense" and as a "fearless and effective prosecutor". She stayed in the post for a typical length of time and had a common reaction to the job: "After a while, you forget there are decent, law-abiding people in life."

Sotomayor married Kevin Edward Noonan in 1976, and they divorced amicably in 1983; they had no children. She said that the pressures of her working life were a contributing factor, but not the major factor, in the breakup. From 1983 to 1986, Sotomayor had an informal solo practice, dubbed Sotomayor & Associates, located in her Brooklyn apartment. She performed legal consulting, often for friends or family members.

Federal district judge

Nomination and confirmation

Sotomayor had wanted to be a judge since she was in elementary school, and in 1991, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, recommended her for a judgeship. Moynihan had an unusual bipartisan arrangement with his fellow New York senator Al D'Amato, a Republican, whereby he chose roughly one out of every four New York district court seats even though a Republican was in the White House. Moynihan also wanted to fulfill a public promise he had made to get a Hispanic judge appointed for New York. When Moynihan's staff recommended Sotomayor, they said, "Have we got a judge for you!" Moynihan identified with her socioeconomic and academic background and became convinced she would become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. D'Amato enthusiastically backed Sotomayor, who was seen as politically centrist at the time. Of the impending drop in salary from private practice, Sotomayor said: "I've never wanted to get adjusted to my income because I knew I wanted to go back to public service. And in comparison to what my mother earns and how I was raised, it's not modest at all."

On November 27, 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Sotomayor to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by John M. Walker Jr. Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, led by a friendly Democratic majority, went smoothly for her in June 1992, with her pro bono activities winning praise from Senator Ted Kennedy and unanimous approval from the committee. Then a Republican senator blocked her nomination and that of three others for a while in retaliation for an unrelated block Democrats had put on another nominee. D'Amato objected strongly; some weeks later, the block was dropped, and Sotomayor was confirmed by unanimous consent of the full Senate on August 11 and received her commission the next day.

Sotomayor became the youngest judge in the Southern District and the first Hispanic federal judge in New York State. She became the first Puerto Rican woman to serve as a judge in a U.S. federal court. She was one of seven women among the district's 58 judges. She moved from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, back to the Bronx in order to live within her district.

Judgeship

Sotomayor generally kept a low public profile as a district court judge. She showed a willingness to take anti-government positions in a number of cases, and during her first year in the seat, she received high ratings from liberal public-interest groups. Other sources and organizations regarded her as a centrist during this period. In criminal cases, she gained a reputation for tough sentencing and was not viewed as a pro-defense judge. A Syracuse University study found that in such cases, Sotomayor generally handed out longer sentences than her colleagues, especially when white-collar crime was involved. Fellow district judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum was an influence on Sotomayor in adopting a narrow, "just the facts" approach to judicial decision-making.

As a trial judge, she garnered a reputation for being well-prepared for cases and moving them along a tight schedule. Lawyers before her court viewed her as plain-spoken, intelligent, demanding, and sometimes somewhat unforgiving; one said, "She does not have much patience for people trying to snow her. You can't do it."

Notable rulings

On March 30, 1995, in Silverman v. Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee, Inc., Sotomayor issued a preliminary injunction against Major League Baseball, preventing it from unilaterally implementing a new collective bargaining agreement and using replacement players. Her ruling ended the 1994 baseball strike after 232 days, the day before the new season was scheduled to begin. The Second Circuit upheld Sotomayor's decision and denied the owners' request to stay the ruling. The decision raised her profile, won her the plaudits of baseball fans, and had a lasting effect on the game. In the preparatory phase of the case, Sotomayor told the lawyers on both sides, "I hope none of you assumed ... that my lack of knowledge of any of the intimate details of your dispute meant I was not a baseball fan. You can't grow up in the South Bronx without knowing about baseball."

In Dow Jones v. Department of Justice (1995), Sotomayor sided with the Wall Street Journal in its efforts to obtain and publish a photocopy of the last note left by former Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. She ruled that the public had "a substantial interest" in the note and enjoined the U.S. Justice Department from blocking its release.

In New York Times Co. v. Tasini (1997), freelance journalists sued the New York Times Company for copyright infringement for The New York Times's inclusion in an electronic archival database (LexisNexis) of the work of freelancers it had published. Sotomayor ruled that the publisher had the right to license the freelancers' work. This decision was reversed on appeal, and the Supreme Court upheld the reversal; two dissenters, John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer, took Sotomayor's position.

In Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group (also in 1997), Sotomayor ruled that a book of trivia from the television program Seinfeld infringed on the copyright of the show's producer and did not constitute legal fair use. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld Sotomayor's ruling.

Court of Appeals judge

Nomination and confirmation

On June 25, 1997, President Bill Clinton nominated Sotomayor to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated by J. Daniel Mahoney. Her nomination was initially expected to go smoothly, with the American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary giving her a "well qualified" professional assessment.

But as The New York Times wrote, Sotomayor's nomination became "embroiled in the sometimes tortured judicial politics of the Senate." Some in the Republican majority believed Clinton was eager to name the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice and that an easy confirmation to the appeals court would put Sotomayor in a better position for a possible Supreme Court nomination (despite there being no vacancy at the time nor any indication the Clinton administration was considering nominating her or any Hispanic). Therefore, the Republican majority decided to slow her confirmation. Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh called Sotomayor an "ultraliberal" who was on a "rocket ship" to the Supreme Court.

During her September 1997 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sotomayor parried strong questioning from some Republican members about mandatory sentencing, gay rights, and her level of respect for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The committee approved her nomination in March 1998, with two dissensions. But in June 1998, the Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote that the Clinton administration intended to "get her on to the Second Circuit, then elevate her to the Supreme Court as soon as an opening occurs"; the editorial criticized two of her district court rulings and urged further delay of her confirmation. The Republican block continued.

Ranking Democratic committee member Patrick Leahy objected to Republican use of a secret hold to slow Sotomayor's nomination, and attributed that anonymous tactic to reticence about publicly opposing a female Hispanic nominee. The previous month, Leahy had triggered a procedural delay in the confirmation of fellow Second Circuit nominee Chester J. Straub—whom, although advanced by Clinton and supported by Moynihan, Republicans considered much more acceptable—in an unsuccessful effort to force earlier consideration of Sotomayor's nomination.

During 1998, several Hispanic organizations organized a petition drive in New York State, generating hundreds of signatures from New Yorkers to try to convince D'Amato to push the Senate leadership to bring Sotomayor's nomination to a vote. A backer of Sotomayor who was concerned about his reelection that year, D'Amato helped move the leadership. Sotomayor's nomination had been pending for over a year when Majority Leader Trent Lott scheduled the vote. With complete Democratic support and support from 25 Republicans, including Judiciary Chair Orrin Hatch, Sotomayor was confirmed on October 2, 1998, by a 67–29 vote. She received her commission on October 7.

Judgeship

Over her 10 years on the Second Circuit, Sotomayor heard appeals in more than 3,000 cases and wrote about 380 majority opinions. The Supreme Court reviewed five of those, reversing three and affirming two—not high numbers for an appellate judge of that many years and a typical percentage of reversals.

Sotomayor's circuit court rulings led to her being considered a political centrist by the ABA Journal and other sources and organizations. Several lawyers, legal experts, and news organizations identified her as someone with liberal inclinations. The Second Circuit's caseload typically skewed more toward business and securities law rather than hot-button social or constitutional issues. Sotomayor tended to write narrow, practiced rulings that relied on close application of the law to the facts of a case rather than general philosophical viewpoints. A Congressional Research Service analysis found that her rulings defied easy ideological categorization, but did show adherence to precedent and avoidance of overstepping the circuit court's judicial role. Unusually, Sotomayor read through all the supporting documents of cases under review; her lengthy rulings explored every aspect of a case and tended to feature leaden, ungainly prose. Some legal experts have said that her attention to detail and re-examination of the facts of a case came close to overstepping the traditional role of appellate judges.

Across some 150 cases involving business and civil law, Sotomayor's rulings were generally unpredictable and not consistently pro-business or anti-business. Sotomayor's influence on the federal judiciary, as measured by the number of citations of her rulings by other judges and in law review articles, increased significantly during the length of her appellate judgeship and was greater than that of some other prominent federal appeals court judges. Two academic studies showed that the proportion of Sotomayor's decisions that overrode policy decisions by elected branches was the same as or lower than that of other circuit judges.

Sotomayor was a member of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts. In October 2001, she presented the annual Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley School of Law; titled "A Latina Judge's Voice"; it was published in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal in 2002. In the speech, she discussed the characteristics of her Latina upbringing and culture and the history of minorities and women ascending to the federal bench. She said the low number of minority women on the federal bench at that time was "shocking". She then discussed at length how her own experiences as a Latina might affect her decisions as a judge. In any case, her background in activism did not necessarily influence her rulings: in a study of 50 racial discrimination cases brought before her panel, 45 were rejected, with Sotomayor never filing a dissent. An expanded study showed that Sotomayor decided 97 cases involving a claim of discrimination and rejected those claims nearly 90 percent of the time. Another examination of Second Circuit split decisions on cases that dealt with race and discrimination showed no clear ideological pattern in Sotomayor's opinions.

Notable rulings

In the 2002 decision Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush, Sotomayor upheld the Bush administration's implementation of the Mexico City Policy, which is that "the United States will no longer contribute to separate nongovernmental organizations which perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations." Sotomayor held that the policy did not constitute a violation of equal protection, as "the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds."

In Pappas v. Giuliani (2002), Sotomayor dissented from her colleagues' ruling that the New York Police Department could terminate from his desk job an employee who sent racist materials through the mail. She argued that the First Amendment protected speech by the employee "away from the office, on [his] own time", even if that speech was "offensive, hateful, and insulting", and that therefore the employee's First Amendment claim should have gone to trial rather than being dismissed on summary judgment.

In 2005, Sotomayor wrote the opinion for United States v. Quattrone. Frank Quattrone had been on trial on charges of obstructing investigations related to technology IPOs. After his first trial ended in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial, some members of the media had wanted to publish the names of the jurors deciding the case, and a district court had issued an order barring the publication, even though their names had previously been disclosed in open court. In United States v. Quattrone, Sotomayor wrote the opinion for the Second Circuit panel striking down this order on First Amendment grounds, saying that the media was free to publish the names. Sotomayor held that although it was important to protect the fairness of the retrial, the district court's order was an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech and violated the right of the press "to report freely on events that transpire in an open courtroom".

In 2008, Sotomayor was on a three-judge panel in Doninger v. Niehoff that unanimously affirmed, in an opinion by Second Circuit Judge Debra Livingston, the district court's judgment that Lewis S. Mills High School did not violate a student's First Amendment rights when it barred her from running for student government after she called the superintendent and other school officials "douchebags" in a blog post written while off-campus that encouraged students to call an administrator and "piss her off more". Livingston held that the district judge did not abuse her discretion in holding that the student's speech "foreseeably create[d] a risk of substantial disruption within the school environment", which is the precedent in the Second Circuit for when schools may regulate off-campus speech. Although Sotomayor did not write this opinion, she has been criticized by some who disagree with it.

Supreme Court justice

Nomination and confirmation

After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, speculation arose that Sotomayor could be a leading candidate for a Supreme Court seat. New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand wrote Obama a letter urging him to appoint Sotomayor or Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to the Supreme Court if a vacancy arose during his term. The White House first contacted Sotomayor on April 27, 2009, about the possibility of her nomination.

On April 30, 2009, Justice David Souter's retirement plans leaked to the press, and Sotomayor received early attention as a possible nominee for Souter's seat, to be vacated in June 2009. But in May 2009, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe urged Obama not to appoint Sotomayor, writing, "she's not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is" and "her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire and simply add to the fire power of the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas wing of the court." While considering various possible nominees, Tribe strongly recommended Elena Kagan over Sotomayor.

On May 25, 2009, Obama informed Sotomayor of his choice; she later said, "I had my [hand] over my chest, trying to calm my beating heart, literally." On May 26, Obama nominated her. She became only the second jurist to be nominated to three different judicial positions by three different presidents. The selection appeared to closely match Obama's presidential campaign promise that he would nominate judges who had "the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old."

Sotomayor's nomination was praised by Democrats and liberals, and Democrats appeared to have sufficient votes to confirm her. The strongest criticism of her nomination came from conservatives and some Republican senators regarding a line she had used in similar forms in a number of her speeches, particularly in a 2001 Berkeley Law lecture: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Sotomayor had made similar remarks in other speeches between 1994 and 2003, including one she submitted as part of her confirmation questionnaire for the Court of Appeals in 1998, but they attracted little attention at the time. The remark now became widely known. The rhetoric quickly became inflamed, with radio commentator Rush Limbaugh and former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich calling Sotomayor a "racist" (although Gingrich later backtracked from that claim), while John Cornyn and other Republican senators denounced such attacks but called Sotomayor's approach troubling. Sotomayor's backers offered a variety of defenses of the remark, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Sotomayor's word choice in 2001 had been "poor". Sotomayor subsequently clarified her remark through Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy, saying that while life experience shapes who one is, "ultimately and completely" a judge follows the law regardless of personal background.

Justiceship

Sotomayor cast her first vote as an associate Supreme Court justice on August 17, 2009, in a stay of execution case. She was given a warm welcome onto the Court and was formally invested in a September 8 ceremony. The first case in which Sotomayor heard arguments was on September 9 during a special session, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It involved the controversial aspect of the First Amendment and the rights of corporations in campaign finance; Sotomayor dissented. In her vigorous examination of Floyd Abrams, representing the First Amendment issues in the case, Sotomayor questioning the Court's 19th-century rulings and said, "What you are suggesting is that the courts, who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court's error to start with ... [imbuing] a creature of State law with human characteristics."

Sotomayor's first major written opinion was a dissent in the Berghuis v. Thompkins case dealing with Miranda rights. As her first year neared completion, Sotomayor said she felt swamped by the job's intensity and heavy workload. During the oral arguments for National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, Sotomayor showed her increasing familiarity with the Court and its protocols by directing the opening questions of the arguments to Donald Verrilli, the Solicitor General representing the government's position.

In succeeding Souter, Sotomayor did not change the Court's net philosophical and ideological balance. Many cases are decided unanimously or with different voting coalitions, but Sotomayor has remained a reliable member of the Court's liberal bloc when the justices divide along the commonly perceived ideological lines. Specifically, her voting pattern and judicial philosophy has been in close agreement with that of Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Kagan. During her first few years there, Sotomayor voted with Ginsburg and Breyer 90 percent of the time, one of the highest agreement rates on the Court. In a 2015 article, "Ranking the Most Liberal Modern Supreme Court Justices", Alex Greer identified Sotomayor as representing a more liberal voting pattern than both Kagan and Ginsburg. Greer assigned Sotomayor the most liberal voting history of all the sitting justices, and a slightly less liberal record than her predecessors Thurgood Marshall and John Marshall Harlan II.

Chief Justice Roberts, together with Justices Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito (and former Justice Scalia) had comprised the Court's identifiable conservative wing. Although in 2009 five of the justices self-identified as having Roman Catholic affiliation, Sotomayor's voting history identifies her singly among them with the liberal bloc of the Court. There is a wide divergence among Catholics in general in their approaches to the law. Due to her upbringing and her past jobs and positions, Sotomayor has brought one of the more diverse sets of life experiences to the Court.

Notable rulings

In 2011, Sotomayor wrote the majority opinion in J.D.B. v. North Carolina, in which the Supreme Court held that age is relevant when determining when a person is in police custody for Miranda purposes. J.D.B. was a 13-year-old student enrolled in special education classes whom police suspected of committing two robberies. A police investigator visited J.D.B. at school, where he was interrogated by the investigator, a uniformed police officer, and school officials. J.D.B. subsequently confessed to his crimes and was convicted. He was not given a Miranda warning during the interrogation, nor an opportunity to contact his legal guardian. In determining that a child's age properly informs the Miranda custody analysis, Sotomayor wrote, "to hold... that a child's age is never relevant to whether a suspect has been taken into custody—and thus to ignore the very real differences between children and adults—would be to deny children the full scope of the procedural safeguards that Miranda guarantees to adults". Her opinion cited Stansbury v. California (holding that a child's age "would have affected how a reasonable person" would "perceive his or her freedom to leave") and Yarborough v. Alvarado (holding that a child's age "generates commonsense conclusions about behavior and perception"). Sotomayor also pointed out that the law recognizes that a child's judgment is not the same as an adult's, in the form of legal disqualifications on children as a class (e.g., limitations on a child's ability to marry without parental consent). Justice Alito wrote a dissenting opinion that three other justices joined.

In United States v. Alvarez (2012), the Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act (a federal law that criminalized false statements about having received a military medal) on First Amendment grounds. While a 6–3 majority of the Court agreed that the law was an unconstitutional violation of the Free Speech Clause, it did not agree on a rationale. Sotomayor was among four justices, along with Roberts, Ginsburg and Kennedy, who concluded that a statement's falsity is not enough, by itself, to exclude speech from First Amendment protection. Justices Breyer and Kagan concluded that while false statements are entitled to some protection, the act was invalid because it could have achieved its objectives in less restrictive ways. Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito dissented.

In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), Sotomayor was part of a 5–4 majority that upheld most of the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (while being part of a dissent against the reliance upon the Constitution's Taxing and Spending Clause rather than Commerce Clause in arriving at the support). Legal writer Jeffrey Toobin wrote, "Sotomayor's concerns tended toward the earthbound and practical. Sometimes, during oral arguments, she would go on tangents involving detailed questions about the facts of cases that would leave her colleagues stupefied, sinking into their chairs. This time, though, she had a simple line of inquiry. States require individuals to buy automobile insurance (implicitly suggesting the unavoidable comparison to health insurance and the fairness of applying the same principle to health insurance as well)." Sotomayor concluded with a rhetorical flourish directed at the attorneys: "Do you think that if some states decided not to impose an insurance requirement that the federal government would be without power to legislate and require every individual to buy car insurance?" For Toobin, this distinction Sotomayor drew was the heart of the majority's argument.

Other activities

From 1998 to 2007, Sotomayor was an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law, where she taught trial and appellate advocacy and a federal appellate court seminar. Beginning in 1999, she was also a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School in a paying, adjunct faculty position. While there she created and co-taught a class called the Federal Appellate Externship each semester from 2000 until her departure; it combined classroom, moot court, and Second Circuit chambers work. She became a member of Princeton University's Board of Trustees in 2006, concluding her term in 2011. In 2008, Sotomayor became a member of the Belizean Grove, an invitation-only women's group modeled after the men's Bohemian Grove. On June 19, 2009, Sotomayor resigned from the Belizean Grove after Republican politicians voiced concerns over the group's membership policy.

Sotomayor has maintained a public presence, mostly through making speeches, since joining the federal judiciary and throughout her time on the Supreme Court. She gave over 180 speeches between 1993 and 2009, about half of which either focused on issues of ethnicity or gender or were delivered to minority or women's groups. While on the Supreme Court she has been invited to give commencement addresses at a number of universities, including New York University (2012), Yale University (2013), and the University of Puerto Rico (2014). Her speeches have tended to give a clearer picture of her worldview than her rulings. They have often focused on ethnic identity and experience, the need for diversity, and America's struggle with the implications of its diverse makeup. She has also presented her career achievements as an example of the success of affirmative action policies in university admissions, saying "I am the perfect affirmative action baby" in regard to her belief that her admission test scores were not comparable to those of her classmates. In 2012, Sotomayor made two appearances as herself on the children's television program Sesame Street, explaining what a vocational career is in general and then demonstrating how a judge hears a case.

In 2010, Sotomayor signed a contract with Alfred A. Knopf to publish a memoir about the early part of her life. She received an advance of nearly $1.2 million for the book, which was published in 2013 and titled My Beloved World (Mi mundo adorado in the simultaneously published Spanish edition). It focuses on her life up to 1992, with recollections of growing up in housing projects in New York and descriptions of the challenges she faced. It received good reviews, with Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times calling it "a compelling and powerfully written memoir about identity and coming of age. ... It's an eloquent and affecting testament to the triumph of brains and hard work over circumstance, of a childhood dream realized through extraordinary will and dedication." Sotomayor staged a book tour to promote it, and it debuted atop the New York Times Best Seller List.

Personal life

On August 14, 1976, just after graduating from Princeton, Sotomayor married Kevin Edward Noonan, whom she had dated since high school, in a small chapel at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. She used the married name Sonia Sotomayor de Noonan. They divorced in 1983, and Noonan became a biologist and patent lawyer.

Awards and honors

Sotomayor has received honorary law degrees from Lehman College (1999), Princeton University (2001), Brooklyn Law School (2001), Pace University School of Law (2003), Hofstra University (2006), Northeastern University School of Law (2007), Howard University (2010), St. Lawrence University (2010), Paris Nanterre University (2010), New York University (2012), Yale University (2013), the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras (2014), and an honorary doctorate of human letters from Manhattan University (2019).

She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. She was given the Outstanding Latino Professional Award in 2006 by the Latino/a Law Students Association. In 2008, Esquire magazine included Sotomayor on its list of "The 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century". In 2013, Sotomayor won the Woodrow Wilson Award at Princeton University.

In June 2010, the Bronxdale Houses development, where Sotomayor grew up, was renamed after her. The Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses and Justice Sonia Sotomayor Community Center comprise 28 buildings with some 3,500 residents. Many New York housing developments are named after well-known people, but this was only the second to be named after a former resident. In 2011, the Sonia M. Sotomayor Learning Academies, a public high school complex in Los Angeles, was named after her.

In 2013, a painting featuring her, Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan was unveiled at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In May 2015, she received the Katharine Hepburn medal from Bryn Mawr College. In 2019, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and 2024 she received the Radcliffe Medal from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, awarded annually to "an individual who has had a transformative impact on society."

Publications

Books

Sotomayor, Sonia (2022) Just Help! How to Build a Better World. New York: Penguin Random House. ISBN 9780593206263.

Sotomayor, Sonia (2019). Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You. New York: Penguin Random House. ISBN 9780525514121.

Sotomayor, Sonia (2019). The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor. New York: Penguin Random House. ISBN 9781524771171.

Sotomayor, Sonia (2018). Turning Pages: My Life Story. New York: Philomel Books. ISBN 9780525514084.

Sotomayor, Sonia (2013). My Beloved World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780307594884.

Articles

Sotomayor, Sonia (2017). "A Tribute to Justice Scalia" (PDF). Yale Law Journal. 126: 1609–1611.

Sotomayor, Sonia (1999). "La Independencia Judicial: Que Necesitamos Para Conservarla". Revista Colegio de Abogados de Puerto Rico. 60: 59.

Sotomayor, Sonia; Gordon, Nicole A. (1996). "Returning Majesty to the Law and Politics: A Modern Approach" (PDF). Suffolk University Law Review. 30: 35–51. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 19, 2009.

Sotomayor, Sonia (1979). "Statehood and the Equal Footing Doctrine: The Case for Puerto Rican Seabed Rights" (PDF). Yale Law Journal. 88 (4): 825–849. doi:10.2307/795781. JSTOR 795781.

Forewords

Sotomayor, Sonia (2007). "Foreword". In Terris, Daniel; Romano, Cesare P. R.; Swigart, Leigh (eds.). The International Judge: An Introduction to the Men and Women who Decide the World's Cases. Lebanon: University Press of New England. ISBN 9781584656661.

Speeches

Sotomayor, Sonia (2014). "A Conversation with Justice Sotomayor" (PDF). Yale Law Journal Forum. 123: 375–391.

Sotomayor, Sonia (2004). "A Latina Judge's Voice (Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture)" (PDF). Berkeley la Raza Law Journal. 13: 87–93.

Sotomayor, Sonia (2004). "Tribute to John Sexton" (PDF). NYU Annual Survey of American Law. 60: 23–26.