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 conservative bloc had prevailed, and was opposed by the court's three female members: Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Kagan. They suggested that the Hobby Lobby decision was not the Court's conclusive opinion on birth control. In her dissent to the injunction, Sotomayor wrote that, "Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word ... Not today." Sotomayor stated further her opinion that the decision compromised "hundreds of Wheaton's employees and students of their legal entitlement to contraceptive coverage." Sotomayor was an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law from 1998 to 2007. There