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-serving institution Hispanic-serving institution A Hispanic-Serving Institution, or HSI, is defined in federal law (the Higher Education Opportunity Act, Title V, 2008) as an accredited, degree-granting, public or private nonprofit institution of higher education with 25% or more total undergraduate Hispanic full-time equivalent (FTE) student enrollment. The federal definition can be found here. In the 2016-17 academic year, 492 institutions met the federal enrollment criterion. According to Title III of the Higher Education Act of 1965, in order for an HSI to receive federal funding it must satisfy the following criteria: The Department of Education offers grants to institutions defined as HSIs