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
Asian Hispanic and Latino Americans them at 277,704. In the 2010 Census, there were 598,146 Asian Hispanic or Latino Americans, including those who are multiracial in origin. Filipino Americans, often have Spanish surnames from the Alphabetical Catalog of Surnames, due to an 1849 decree. Asian Hispanic and Latino Americans Asian Hispanic and Latino Americans are Hispanic and Latino Americans having Asian ancestry and for those Hispanics who consider themselves or were officially classified by the United States Census Bureau, Office of Management and Budget, and other U.S. government agencies as Asian Americans. Hispanicity, which is independent of race, is the only ethnic category, as opposed