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
National Institute for Latino Policy the United States. Including at Brandies University, Cornell University, the Dominican-American National Roundtable Conference in Providence, Rhode Island, the New York Chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), the Latino Policy Forum in Chicago, LULAC Annual Conference in Washington, DC, Northern Illinois University, the Puerto Rican Studies Association 8th Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Proskauer Rose LLP, Smith College, UBS, the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute Annual Conference in Chicago, the University of Puerto Rico, and the University of Texas at Austin. Among others. Initiated national campaign to support nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for Associate