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 of Spanish or Latin American descent did not choose to use the terms "Hispanic" or "Latino" when describing their identity. Instead, they preferred to be identified by their country of origin. Over half of those surveyed said they had no preference for either term. When forced to choose, 33% chose "Hispanic" and 14% chose "Latino." A study done in 2009 shows that there is not a significant difference between the attitudes or preferences towards the terms among young (18–25) and older individuals. The statistical numbers are almost identical. Among the overall Hispanic population, young Hispanic prefer to identify themselves with