Biography
An American Story
On May 26, 2009, President Barack Obama announced the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to be an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Judge Sotomayor would bring more federal judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any justice in 100 years, and more overall judicial experience than anyone confirmed for the Court in the past 70 years.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor was born to a Puerto Rican family and grew up in a public housing project in the South Bronx. Her parents moved to New York during World War II – her mother served in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps during the war. Her father, a factory worker with a third-grade education, died when Sotomayor was nine years old. Her mother, a nurse, then raised Sotomayor and her younger brother, Juan, now a physician in Syracuse.
Sotomayor graduated as valedictorian of her class at Blessed Sacrament and at Cardinal Spellman High School in New York. She then attended Princeton University on scholarships and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1976. At Princeton, Sotomayor was a co-recipient of the M. Taylor Pyne Prize, the highest honor Princeton awards to an undergraduate. Following college, she attended Yale Law School, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and as managing editor of the Yale Studies in World Public Order.
After law school, Judge Sotomayor joined the New York County District Attorney’s Office as an Assistant District Attorney. During her 4 ½ years there, she prosecuted serious criminal cases, including “street crimes,” such as homicides and robberies, and child pornography, child abuse, police misconduct, and fraud cases. This work had her in the court room almost every day, for both bench and jury trials. Robert Morgenthau, the District Attorney of the County of New York who hired Sotomayor, recently described her as a “fearless and effective prosecutor.”
In 1984, Sotomayor entered private practice, becoming a partner in 1988 at the firm Pavia and Harcourt. She was a general civil litigator involved in all facets of commercial work, including real estate, employment, banking, contracts, and agency law. In addition, her practice had a significant concentration in intellectual property law, including trademark, copyright and unfair competition issues. Her typical clients were large corporations doing international business.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush nominated Sotomayor to the Southern District of New York and was she was unanimously confirmed in 1992. From 1992 to 1998, she presided over roughly 450 cases, and by the time of her nomination to the Second Circuit just five (or roughly 1 percent) of her rulings had been overturned. As a trial judge, she earned a reputation as a sharp and fearless jurist who did not let powerful interests bully her into departing from the rule of law. In 1995, for example, she issued an injunction against Major League Baseball owners, effectively ending a baseball strike that had become the longest work stoppage in professional sports history and had caused the cancellation of the World Series the previous fall. She was widely lauded for “saving baseball.”
In 1998, President Clinton elevated Judge Sotomayor to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals where she has served for eleven years. She is the first Latina to serve on that court. She has participated in over 3000 panel decisions, authoring approximately 400 published opinions.
In addition to her distinguished judicial service, Judge Sotomayor is a Lecturer at Columbia University Law School and was also an adjunct professor at New York University Law School until 2007. She has served as a member of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts and was formerly on the Boards of Directors of the New York Mortgage Agency, the New York City Campaign Finance Board, and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Judge Sotomayor is deeply committed to her family, to her co-workers, and to her community. She is a doting aunt to her brother Juan’s three children and an attentive godmother to five more. She still speaks to her mother, who now lives in Florida, every day.