Sonia Sotomayor

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Sonia Maria Sotomayor (Spanish: [sonja sotoma] (born June 25, 1954) is an American lawyer and jurist who works as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. On May 26, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated her and has been with her since August 8, 2009. She is the third woman, first Hispanic, and first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court.

Sotomayor was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. Her father died when she was nine years old and her mother raised her afterwards. Sotomayor received her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at Yale Law Journal. She served as an assistant district attorney in New York for four and a half years before beginning private practice in 1984. She served on the boards of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Fund, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board.

President George H. Bush nominated Sotomayor to the Southern District Court of New York in 1991, and confirmation followed in 1992. President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Second Circuit of Appeals in 1997. Her nomination was slowed by the Republican majority in the United States Senate, but she was eventually confirmed in 1998. Sotomayor received appeals in more than 3,000 cases and wrote about 380 opinions on the Second Circuit. Sotomayor has taught at the New York University School of Law and Columbia Law School.

Following Justice David Souter's retirement, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court in May 2009. By a vote of 68–31, her nomination was confirmed by the Senate in August 2009. Sotomayor has endorsed the informal liberal bloc of justices in the absence of a disagreement along ideological lines even on the Court. Sotomayor has expressed concern about the rights of plaintiffs and criminal justice reform during her Supreme Court tenure, and she is known for her vehement oppositions on issues of race, gender, and ethnicity, including Schuette vs. BAMN, Utah vs. Strieff, and Trump vs. Hawaii.

Early life

Sotomayor was born in The Bronx, a borough in New York City. Juan Sotomayor (1921–1964), a San Juan, Puerto Rico, native, and her mother, Celina Báez (1927–2021), an orphanage from Santa Rosa, Puerto Rico's southwest coast, was a child of Juan Sotomayor (1921–2021).

After Celina served in the Women's Army Corps, the two left Puerto Rico separately, met, and married during World War II. Juan Sotomayor had a third-grade education, did not speak English, and worked as a tool and die worker; Celina Baez worked as a telephone operator and then a practical nurse; Juan Sotomayor, Sonia's younger brother (born c. 1957), went on to work as a surgeon and university professor in Syracuse, New York.

Sotomayor was raised Catholic and grew up in Puerto Rican communities in the South Bronx and East Bronx; she self-identifies as a "Nuyorican." The family lived in a South Bronx tenement before moving to a well-maintained, racially and ethnically mixed Bronx Houses housing project in Soundview in 1957 (which has since been referred to both the East Bronx and South Bronx). In 2010, the Bronxdale Houses were renamed in her honour. Her close proximity to Yankee Stadium prompted her to become a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees. During the summers, the extended family got together and went back to Puerto Rico on a daily basis.

Sonia grew up with an alcoholic father and a mother who was emotionally distant; she felt most like her grandmother, who later said that she was given a source of "protection and purpose." At age seven, Sonia was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and started injecting insulin every day. When she was nine years old, her father suffered with heart disease at the age 42. She became fluent in English after this. Sotomayor said she was first inspired by Nancy Drew's book character, and after her diabetes diagnosis led to doctors' rejection of a different path from detective, she was inspired to pursue a career as a judge by watching the Perry Mason television series. "I was going to college and I was going to become an attorney," she said when she was ten years old. Ten. There's no shame in it.

Celina Sotomayor placed a lot emphasis on education, purchasing the Encyclopdia Britannica for her children, which was unusual in the housing market. Despite the distance between the two families, which grew worse after her father's death and which wasn't fully recovered until decades later, Sotomayor has credited her mother with being her "life inspiration." Sotomayor attended Blessed Sacrament School in Soundview, where she was valedictorian and had a near-perfect attendance record. Sotomayor worked at a local grocery store and a hospital while she was under the age of 18. Sotomayor passed the entrance exams and then attended Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. Sotomayor was on the forensics team and was elected to the student government at Cardinal Spellman. In 1972, she was named vaindictorian, a vain professor. In the meantime, the Bronxdale Houses had been victimized to increasing heroin use, murder, and the emergence of the Black Spades gang. The family was able to flee Co-op City in the Northeast Bronx in 1970.

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Early legal career

Sotomayor was recruited out of law school as an assistant district attorney under New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's recommendation beginning in 1979. "I did not feel pressure from my neighborhood, from the third world community at Yale," she said at the time. They had no idea why I was doing this job. I'm not sure if I've ever solved the problem." As a result of rising crime rates and heroin abuse in New York, Morgenthau's employees were overwhelmed with lawsuits, and Sotomayor, like other rookie lawyers, was reluctant to appear in court. She worked in the trial division and prosecuted a slew of cases, from shoplifting and prostitution to robberies, assaults, and murders. She has also worked on cases involving police brutality. She was not afraid to explore difficult neighborhoods or live in squalid circumstances in order to question witnesses. She was good at cross examination and at simplifying a situation in ways to which a jury could relate. Richard Maddicks (also known as the "Tarzan Murderer"), who robbed apartments and shot people for no reason in 1983, was she aided in convict Richard Maddicks (also known as the "Tarzan Murderer") who robbed them. She believed lower-level crimes were largely due to socioeconomic climate and poverty, but she had a different view on serious criminals: "I'm still outraged by violent crime." Whether or not I can sympathize with the reasons that lead to these crimes, the consequences are shocking." "The saddest offences for me were the ones that my own people committed against each other," a Hispanic-on-Hispanic crime was particularly troubling to her. She displayed a passion for bringing law and order to the streets of New York, demonstrating a unique interest in seeking child pornography cases, which was unusual for the time. She worked 15-hour days and gained a reputation for being compelled as well as for her preparedness and fairness. One of her work reviews rated her as a "potential superstar." Morgenthau described her as "smart, hard-working, [and] having] a lot of common sense] and as a "fearless and efficient prosecutor." She served for a long time in the position for a long time, and she had a common reaction to her work: "You forget there are good, law-abiding people in life after a while."

In 1983, Sotomayor and Noonan divorced amicably, although they did not have children. The pressures of her professional life, she has said, were a contributing factor, but not the primary factor, in the break up. Sotomayor & Associates, a Brooklyn firm, operated from 1983 to 1986. She did legal work, often for acquaintances or relatives.

She began private practice in 1984, joining Pavia & Harcourt's Manhattan corporate litigation group as an associate. She specialized in intellectual property law, international law, and arbitration, making her one of the firm's 30 attorneys specialized in intellectual property litigation, international law, and arbitration. "I wanted to finish myself as an advocate," she later stated. Despite the fact that she had no expertise in civil litigation, the firm recruited her heavily, and she learned quickly on the job. Rather than being part of a larger law group, she was keen to investigate cases and argue in court rather than being part of a larger law firm. Her clients were mainly multinational companies doing business in the United States, and a substantial portion of her time was spent tracking down and suing counterfeiters of Fendi products. In some instances, Sotomayor went on-site with the police to Harlem or Chinatown to confiscate illegitimate merchandise, while riding a motorcycle. Pavia & Harcourt's efforts were "much like a drug operation," she said at the time, and thousands of counterfeit accessories were sold by "Fendi Crush," a destruction-by-garbage parade at Tavern on the Green. She also dealt with dry legal problems, such as grain export contract disputes, at other times. In a 1986 appearance on Good Morning America that profiled women, she said that the bulk of law practice was drudgery and that, although she was content with her life, she had hoped for more out of herself coming out of college. She became a partner at the firm in 1988, but not in a way that extravagant. She became a judge in 1992 when she first began working in 1992.

Sotomayor obtained public service positions in addition to her law firm careers. She was not affiliated with the party bosses who usually picked people for those positions in New York, and she was not registered as an outsider, as well as a woman who was officially registered as an outsider. Rather, District Attorney Morgenthau, a prominent figure, served as her patron. Governor of New York Mario Cuomo appointed Sotomayor to the board of the State of New York Mortgage Agency in 1987, which she continued with until 1992. The department assisted low-income people in getting home mortgages and offering insurance for housing and hospices for people of AIDS as part of one of the largest urban reconstruction efforts in American history. Despite being the youngest member of a board of directors made the operation run as smoothly as possible. She was outspoken in favor of affordable housing, directing more funds to lower-income home owners, and raising questions regarding gentrification's effects in the end, but ultimately she voted in favor of all of the initiatives.

Sotomayor was appointed by Mayor Ed Koch in 1988 as one of the founding members of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, where she served for four years. She played a leading role in the board's adoption of a voluntary program in which local candidates received public matching funds in exchange for limitations on contributions and spending and consenting to greater financial disclosure. Sotomayor demonstrated no patience with candidates who refused to follow rules, and he was more of a stickler for pressuring campaigns to follow those laws than any of the other board members. She was one of the many court decisions that fined, investigated, or reprimanded Koch, David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani's mayoral campaigns.

Sotomayor, a member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1980 to 1992, was a member of the board of directors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, based on another recommendation from Cabranes. She was a leading policy maker who collaborated closely with the company's attorneys on topics including New York City recruiting practices, police brutality, the death penalty, and voting rights. The group won its most visible triumph when it stopped a city primary election on the grounds that minority voters' clout diminished the power of minority voters.

Sotomayor served on the board of the Maternity Center Association, a Manhattan-based non-profit group dedicated to raising the quality of maternity care between 1985 and 1986.

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