Sonia Sotomayor was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at seven, lost her father at nine, and grew up in a Bronx housing project. She went to Princeton, then Yale Law, then the federal bench, and in 2009 became the first Hispanic justice in the history of the United States Supreme Court. She has spent the years since writing some of the most widely read dissents of the modern court.
Quick Bio / At a Glance
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Sonia Maria Sotomayor |
| Date of Birth | June 25, 1954 |
| Birthplace | The Bronx, New York City |
| Heritage | Puerto Rican |
| Education | Princeton University, summa cum laude; Yale Law School |
| Early Career | Assistant District Attorney, New York County; private practice |
| District Judge | Southern District of New York, 1992–1998 |
| Appeals Judge | Second Circuit, 1998–2009 |
| Supreme Court | Associate Justice since August 8, 2009 |
| Firsts | First Hispanic justice; third woman appointed |
| Memoir | My Beloved World (2013) |
The Bronx
Sotomayor was born in the Bronx on June 25, 1954, to Puerto Rican parents. Her father, a tool-and-die worker with a third-grade education, died when she was nine. Her mother Celina worked as a nurse and raised Sonia and her brother in the Bronxdale Houses.
She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at seven and learned to inject her own insulin as a child — a detail she has returned to often as the origin of her discipline.
She has said that watching Perry Mason gave her the idea of becoming a judge. She attended Cardinal Spellman High School and was valedictorian.
Princeton and Yale
Sotomayor arrived at Princeton on a scholarship and has described the early disorientation of it candidly — she has said she felt like a visitor landing in an alien country.
She graduated summa cum laude in 1976 and received the Pyne Prize, Princeton’s highest undergraduate honour. At Yale Law School she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal.
Prosecutor, Then Practice
She joined the Manhattan District Attorney’s office under Robert Morgenthau in 1979, spending five years prosecuting everything from shoplifting to homicide.
In 1984 she moved into private practice at Pavia & Harcourt, working on commercial litigation and intellectual property — a deliberately different kind of law from the criminal work that preceded it.
The Federal Bench
District Court
President George H. W. Bush nominated her to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1991, and she took the bench in 1992 at thirty-eight.
Her best-known ruling from that period came in 1995, when she issued the injunction against Major League Baseball owners that effectively ended the 1994–95 players’ strike. It made her briefly famous as the judge who saved baseball.
Second Circuit
President Bill Clinton elevated her to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where she served from 1998 to 2009 — eleven years producing the substantial appellate record that supported her later nomination.
The Supreme Court
President Barack Obama nominated her in May 2009 to succeed Justice David Souter. She was confirmed and sworn in on August 8, 2009, becoming the first Hispanic and third woman to serve on the Court.
She has become the Court’s most consistently liberal member and is best known for her dissents, which are written in unusually direct language and are frequently read from the bench. Her dissenting opinions on affirmative action, policing, immigration and executive power are among the most widely circulated judicial writing in the country.
She has served for more than fifteen years and now sits in a persistent minority on a Court with a six-three conservative majority.
Writing
Sotomayor published her memoir My Beloved World in 2013, covering her life up to her appointment to the federal bench. It was a substantial commercial success and unusually candid for a sitting justice.
She has since written several children’s books, including a young readers’ adaptation of the memoir, and books about disability and difference drawn partly on her own childhood illness.
Why the Biography Matters
Supreme Court justices are overwhelmingly drawn from a narrow slice of American life. Sotomayor’s route — public housing, a widowed nurse, a chronic illness managed from childhood — is genuinely unusual on that bench, and she has never treated it as incidental to how she reads the law.
More public-life profiles: Maxine Waters and Joe Biden.
