Sonia Sotomayor

Her father was an orphan with a third-grade education who did not speak English and worked as a tool and die maker. He drank, and died of heart trouble at 42, when she was nine. She had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes two years earlier and was giving herself insulin. She wanted to be Nancy Drew until doctors suggested a different line of work, and settled on Perry Mason instead. Princeton, when she got there in 1972, had about 20 Latino students and not one full-time Latino professor. She told a reporter the university was practicing benign neutrality. She graduated summa cum laude with the Pyne Prize, went to Yale Law, edited the journal, and got no offer at the end, which she called a kick in the teeth.

Robert Morgenthau hired her out of law school in 1979 to prosecute in Manhattan. George H. W. Bush put her on the federal district bench in 1992, making her the first Puerto Rican woman to sit as a United States judge, and in the spring of 1995 she enjoined Major League Baseball from imposing new terms and using replacement players, ending a 232-day strike the day before the season would have opened. Clinton moved her to the Second Circuit in 1998 over a Republican hold. Obama nominated her on May 26, 2009 and she took her seat in August, the third woman and the first Latina on the Court. Her strongest work has been on policing: that a child's age bears on whether he is in custody, that a warrant found afterward cannot launder a stop made on a hunch.

In a 2001 lecture at Berkeley she hoped a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who had not lived that life. Eight years later that sentence was the confirmation hearing. She called it a rhetorical flourish that fell flat. Laurence Tribe had privately urged Obama to pick Elena Kagan, writing that Sotomayor was not nearly as smart as she thought and had a reputation for bullying. Tribe now calls her the Court's leading voice for criminal-justice reform. Then the bookselling. She took an advance of nearly 1.2 million dollars for her memoir, and her Court staff have suggested that colleges and libraries hosting her buy copies to sell, reportedly bringing in 3.7 million dollars through an arrangement other branches of government prohibit.

The reputation is unsettled because the career is unfinished. She has sat since August 2009 and writes now mostly in dissent: that a warrant found after an unlawful stop cannot cure it, that Texas's bounty-hunter abortion statute left constitutional rights more vulnerable than ever, that Dobbs was the eradication of a right. Whether that becomes law or a record of losses depends on a Court she does not control. Outside it she is the most visible justice: a number one memoir, children's books, an appearance on Sesame Street. The Bronxdale Houses where she grew up were renamed for her in 2010. In 2020 investigators found that a gunman who murdered a federal judge's son had made plans for her too.

Sonia Sotomayor's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Injunction against Major League Baseball case
  Barred the owners from imposing new terms and using replacement players 1995
• J.D.B. v. North Carolina case
  Her majority opinion: a child's age bears on whether he is in police custody 2011
• United States v. Jones, concurrence case
  Called for reconsidering the third-party doctrine in a digital age 2012
• My Beloved World book
  A memoir of her life up to 1992 2013
• Utah v. Strieff, dissent case
  On stops made on an officer's whim or hunch 2016
• Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson, dissent case
  On the Texas abortion law enforced by private lawsuits 2021

• June 25, 1954 aged 0 Born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents Her mother had served in the Women's Army Corps.
• c. 1961 aged ~7 Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at seven
• 1964 aged ~10 Her father dies at 42, when she is nine
• 1976 aged ~22 Graduates from Princeton summa cum laude and takes the Pyne Prize The Pyne is the university's top undergraduate award.
• 1979 aged ~25 Joins Robert Morgenthau's office as an assistant district attorney
• August 12, 1992 aged 38 Takes her seat on the district court for the Southern District of New York Nominated by George H. W. Bush on Daniel Patrick Moynihan's recommendation.
• 1995 aged ~41 Her injunction ends the 232-day baseball strike It came down the day before the new season was to begin.
• October 7, 1998 aged 44 Receives her commission on the Second Circuit
• August 8, 2009 aged 55 Takes her seat on the Supreme Court Nominated by Barack Obama on May 26 to succeed David Souter.

• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. nominated her to the Supreme Court
• George H. W. Bush 1924–2018
  41st president who managed the end of the Cold War and assembled the coalition for the Persian Gulf War. nominated her to the district court
• Bill Clinton b. 1946
  42nd president whose centrist politics, economic agenda, and impeachment shaped the post-Cold War era. nominated her to the Second Circuit
• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. predecessor in the argument
• Earl Warren 1891–1974
  Chief justice whose Court transformed civil rights, voting, representation, and criminal procedure. compared to him on criminal justice