Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States Obama. In 2009, Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, a woman of Puerto Rican descent, to be the first unequivocally Hispanic Justice. Both the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the Hispanic National Bar Association count Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice. Some historians contend that Cardozo—a Sephardic Jew believed to be of distant Portuguese descent—should also be counted as the first Hispanic Justice. Schmidhauser wrote in 1979 that "[a]mong the large ethnic groupings of European origin which have never been represented upon the Supreme Court are the Italians, Southern Slavs, and Hispanic Americans." The National Hispanic Center for
Hispanic–Latino naming dispute their family's country of origin. Both groups prefer the term "American" versus "Latino/Hispanic". Yet, older Hispanics are more likely to identify as white than younger Hispanics. When it comes to the preference of "Latino" or "Hispanic", the younger subgroup is more likely to state that it does not matter. If they do have a preference, both groups prefer the term "Hispanic" rather than "Latino". The term Latin America was first coined by the French in the 19th century as "Amérique latine", during the time of the French Intervention in Mexico. It is a combination of the European word "latino" and