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–Latino naming dispute marketers, advertisers and media content producers can communicate their version of "authentic" racial identity to consumers. Consequently, this opens the space for stereotypes to be created and perpetuated. Others, such as Catherine Alexandra Carter and Rodolfo Acuña, address the issue from a more global and political perspective, stressing the importance of terms like "Latino" or "Hispanic" for the marketing industry and for statistical ends: The terms 'Hispanic' and 'Latino', although first created for the purpose of lumping together a diverse group of people and making them more economically marketable, have grown into something far more significant. Over time the legitimacy