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 She used the married name Sonia Sotomayor de Noonan. He became a biologist and a patent lawyer. Sotomayor entered Yale Law School in the fall of 1976, once more on a scholarship. While she believes she again benefited from affirmative action to compensate for somewhat lower standardized test scores, a former dean of admissions at Yale has said that given her record at Princeton, it probably had little effect. At Yale she fit in well although she found there were again few Latino students. She was known as a hard worker but she was not considered among the star students