Announced today, President Obama has chosen federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.  The nominee will replace retiring Justice David Souter who plans to retire when the summer session ends.  Women’s organizations across the country mounted a strong lobbying effort to urge the President to select a women nominee.

If confirmed, Judge Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic justice to service on the U.S. Supreme Court.  The President hopes to have the new justice confirmed in time for the new court session that begins in October.

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.

Personal Information

Judge Sotomayor is 54 years old and a professed die-hard Yankees fan. “When I was nine or ten, I became enamored of Nancy Drew stories and I wanted to be an investigative detective like her,” Judge Sotomayor recalls. “But I had developed diabetes at 8 and was told I wouldn’t be able to do that kind of work.”