Associate Justice

Institutional context

Sotomayor is the third woman on the Supreme Court of the United States and the first justice of Hispanic heritage in the Court's history.

Career path

Sotomayor earned a BA from Princeton in 1976, where she received the Pyne Prize, and a JD from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She served as Assistant District Attorney for New York County (1979–1984) and practised commercial litigation in private practice. President George H. W. Bush appointed her to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1992; President Clinton elevated her to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1998.

Appointment

President Obama nominated her on 26 May 2009 to succeed Justice David Souter. The Senate confirmed her on 6 August 2009 by 68–31, and she was sworn in on 8 August 2009.

Tenure

Active. Her published opinions, concurrences, and dissents include the dissents in Schuette v. BAMN (2014) and Trump v. United States (2024). She has been one of the Court's most active questioners in oral argument across the period.

Cluster context

Sotomayor's 2009 appointment is in the dataset's slow-rise middle period, contemporaneous with Hillary Clinton's confirmation as Secretary of State and Janet Napolitano's at DHS. The Supreme Court's first-woman pattern itself runs across forty years, with the most recent appointments (Barrett 2020, Jackson 2022) inside the principal cluster window.

Sources

• Supreme Court of the United States — Past Justices
• Federal Judicial Center — Sotomayor biography