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
Sonia Sotomayor who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court's error to start with ... [imbuing] a creature of State law with human characteristics." Sotomayor's first major written opinion was a dissent in the "Berghuis v. Thompkins" case dealing with Miranda rights. As her first year neared completion, Sotomayor said she felt swamped by the intensity and heavy workload of the job. During the oral arguments for "National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius", Sotomayor showed her increasing familiarity with the Court and its protocols by directing