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 and Latino Americans Rican" or "Cuban") as well as those who indicated that they were "other Spanish, Hispanic, or Latino." The national origins classified as Hispanic or Latino by the United States Census Bureau are the following: Argentine, Cuban, Colombian, Puerto Rican, Spaniards, Dominican, Mexican, Costa Rican, Guatemalan, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Panamanian, Salvadoran, Bolivian, Spanish, Chilean, Ecuadorian, Paraguayan, Peruvian, Uruguayan, and Venezuelan. Other U.S. government agencies have slightly different definitions of the term, including Brazilians and other Portuguese-speaking groups. The Census Bureau uses the terms Hispanic and Latino interchangeably. "Origin" can be viewed as the ancestry, nationality group, lineage, or country of birth of