All eyes are on the Supreme Court. With the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, the future of the Court is unknown. But a pillar in upholding justice, equality, civil and immigrant rights remains: Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina Supreme Court Justice in the history of the United States.
Justice Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1954. Her childhood was far from easy. Her parents moved to New York City to raise their children from Puerto Rico, and Justice Sotomayor grew up poor in the South Bronx projects. Her father was an alcoholic, who died of alcoholism when she was nine years old, and her single mother was distant, particularly after her father’s death, as Sotomayor recounts in her best-selling memoir, My Beloved World. Additionally, she grew up with juvenile diabetes, which was seen as a “deadly curse” at the time of her diagnosis. She was not expected to live as long as other people do, which filled her with a sense of urgency that she continues to carry with her, even as the threat has receded. “I couldn’t afford to waste time,” she said. Her beloved cousin Nelson, who she grew up with, “killed himself with drug use,” she wrote. Despite all adversities, Sotomayor persevered, today being one of only four women who have served on the highest court of the land.
“For me, my initial goals were just to graduate from college because nobody in my family had done it. But the idea of having a mark that I wanted to achieve helped me,” she said. When she was in high school, and a friend urged her to apply to “the Ivies,” she did not know what they were. In 1972, however, she entered Princeton University’s freshman class.
She quickly realized that her English and writing skills were deficient compared to her peers, so she designed herself a crash course in writing and reading the classics. And her hard work paid off, she graduated summa cum laude and received the Pyne Prize, the highest academic award given to Princeton undergraduates. During her time at Princeton, she remained in touch with her heritage, joining Puerto Rican groups Acción Puertorriqueña and the Third World Center. These groups, she said, provided her “with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world.”
After graduating from Princeton, she entered Yale Law School, where she was an editor for the Yale Law Journal. She received her J.D. in 1979. The following year, she passed the Bar exam and began working as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, where she served as a trial lawyer prosecuting robbery, assault, murder, police brutality and child pornography cases until 1984. From 1984 to 1992, she was a litigator at New York City’s Pavia & Harcourt, where she climbed from associate to partner. Her simultaneous pro bono work on the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund eventually caught the attention of Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
In 1991, with Kennedy and Moynihan’s support, Sotomayor was nominated for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H.W. Bush. In 1997, President Bill Clinton nominated her for the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. And in 2009, under President Barack Obama, she became the first Latina, and only third woman, to serve on the United States Supreme Court.
Sotomayor’s background and experiences have shaped her work as a judge. Seeing her father and her cousin die of substance abuse shaped her world view at a young age. “That has permitted me, as a judge, to understand that the people who came before me as defendants were human beings with good and potentially very bad things within them,” she said. “I think because of my experiences…I could treat that person in my courtroom as an individual and not as a nonentity and at the same time hold them responsible for their acts,” she added.
Being a Latina, and the first ever to serve on the Court, has given her a special sense of responsibility. “You have to work harder. In every position that I’ve been in, there have been naysayers who don’t believe I’m qualified or who don’t believe I can do the work. And I feel a special responsibility to prove them wrong. I think I work harder than a lot of other people because of that sense of responsibility,” she said.
“Does it mean that I think that I have an obligation to any particular group including Latinos? No. My job is my job and, particularly being a judge, I would be doing a disservice to the Latino community if I ruled on the basis of a preference for any group. … I have to rule as I do on the basis of the law … but I do feel that I have a special responsibility to work harder to prove myself because I am the first of a group that has been perceived as being incapable of doing whatever it is that I’ve had the benefit of becoming a part of,” she added.
On the Court, Justice Sotomayor is a staunch defender of equality and civil rights, often being a deciding vote, alongside the late Justice Ginsburg, in landmark cases. In June of 2015, for example, she joined the majority in upholding a critical component of Obamacare in King v. Burwell. During the same month, she also joined the majority in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states. This year, she joined the majority in DHS v. Regents of the University of California, rejecting the Trump administration’s rescission of the Deferred Childhood Action Program (DACA). She added a scathing concurrence to the opinion, in which she emphasized the fact, overlooked by the majority, that the rescission disproportionately harmed Latinos, writing: “I would not so readily dismiss the allegation that an executive decision disproportionately harms the same racial group that the President branded as less desirable mere months earlier.”