Sonia Sotomayor Sonia Sotomayor Sonia Maria Sotomayor (; born June 25, 1954) is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, appointed by President Barack Obama in May 2009 and confirmed in August 2009. She has the distinction of being its first justice of Hispanic descent and the first Latina. Sotomayor was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated "summa cum laude" from Princeton University in 1976 and received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where
Hispanic–Latino naming dispute population of US citizens with Latin American or Spanish background still abound, and are even more acute. To find out how much people agree or disagree with either term, many polls have been conducted. According to a December 2000 poll by Hispanic Trends, 65% of the registered voters preferred the word "Hispanic", while 30% chose to identify themselves as "Latino". Daniel David Arreola, in his book "Hispanic spaces, Latino places: community and cultural diversity in contemporary America", points out that many Latin Americans feel more comfortable identifying themselves with their country of origin: What most of us know and what