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 States. "Latino" as a category used in the United States may be understood as a shorthand for the Spanish word or the Portuguese phrase , thus excluding speakers of Romance languages from Europe. Both "Hispanic" and "Latino" are generally used to denote people living in the United States, so that "outside the United States, we don't speak of Latinos; we speak of Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and so forth." The term "Hispanic" was adopted by the United States government in the early 1970s during the administration of Richard Nixon after the Hispanic members of an interdepartmental Ad Hoc Committee to