Judge Sonia Sotomayor was sworn in as Associate Justice for the U.S. Supreme Court.  She is the 111th member of the U.S. Supreme Court.  The U.S. Senate voted Thursday  68-31 to confirm President Barack Obama’s nominee who will replace retiring Justice David Souter.  Women’s organizations across the country mounted a strong lobbying effort to urge the President to select a women nominee.

Judge Sotomayor will be the first Hispanic justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.  She would take her seat on the court in early September when the justices convene for a rare out-of-session hearing on a campaign finance case involving a conservative group that opposed the 2008 presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Sotomayor would begin her first full session as the court’s most junior member Oct. 5.

Judge Sotomayor will become just the third woman to serve on the high court.  Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed in 1981 and retired in 2006. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is currently the only woman sitting on the US Supreme Court. 

 55-year-old Sonia Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York to Puerto Rican parents and she grew up in a public housing project just a short walk from the old Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx.  She attended Princeton University where she won the Pyne Prize, the highest award given to an undergraduate.  She received her J.D. at Yale Law School where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. 

Sotomayor was first appointed to a judgeship by President George Bush in 1991 to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.  President Bill Clinton nominated Judge Sotomayor to the Appeals Court in 1997 and she was confirmed in 1998 for that position she still holds today.