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
Latino the following criteria in sampled sets: Neither "Hispanic" nor "Latino" refers to a race, as a person of Latino/Hispanic ethnicity can be of any race. Like non-Latinos, a Latino can be of any race or combination of races: White American / Caucasian, Black / African American, Asian American, Native American / Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander American, or two or more ethnicities. While Brazilian Americans are not included with Hispanics and Latinos in the government's census population reports, any Brazilian American can report as being Hispanic or Latino since Hispanic or Latino origin is, like race or ethnicity, a