Two-Year-Old Note on Sonia Sotomayor

SUPREME COURT REPORT 2009 September 23, 2009 New Justice Sonia Sotomayor, up from the Second Circuit, may have this as her first visible work to do. Upon taking the oath of office, she became the 111th SC justice first Hispanic justice and the third female justice Here are a few lines about her adapted from that most reliable of sources, Wikipedia. Born in The Bronx, of Puerto Rican descent, she calls herself a “Nuyorican.” She lost her father when she was nine, and was raised by her mother. She graduated with honors from Princeton in 1976, did a J.D. at Yale, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. She was an advocate for the hiring of Latino faculty at both schools. She worked as an assistant district attorney in New York for five years before entering private practice in 1984. She played an active role on the boards of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board. In 1991 President Bush nominated her as a federal district judge in NY. n 1995, she issued a preliminary injunction against Major League Baseball which ended the 1994 baseball strike. Sotomayor made a ruling allowing the Wall Street Journal to publish Vince Foster's final note. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her nomination was slowed by the Republican majority in the Senate, but she was eventually confirmed in 1998. On the Second Circuit, Sotomayor heard appeals in more than 3,000 cases and wrote about 380 opinions in ten years. Sotomayor has taught at the New York University School of Law and Columbia Law School. FINE PARTISAN LINES Editorial from Detroit Free Press, modified by me. Conservatives seem to love government interference when it's into people's truly private decisions, such as whom they might marry, whether they can use contraception, or whether they might carry a child to term. But when government attempts to regulate private behavior that affects one-sixth of the U.S. economy, it's somehow overreaching, despite Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce.