Sonia Sotomayor and simple." Sotomayor's law clerks regarded her as a valuable and strong mentor, and she said that she viewed them like family. In 2005, Senate Democrats suggested Sotomayor, among others, to President George W. Bush as an acceptable nominee to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. In the 2002 decision "Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush", Sotomayor upheld the Bush administration's implementation of the Mexico City Policy, which states that "the United States will no longer contribute to separate nongovernmental organizations which perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning
Sonia Sotomayor honorable mention for the Latin American Studies Thesis Prize. As a senior, Sotomayor won the Pyne Prize, the top award for undergraduates, which reflected both strong grades and extracurricular activities. In 1976, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and awarded an A.B. from Princeton, graduating "summa cum laude". She was influenced by the then-fashionable critical race theory, which would be reflected in her later speeches and writings. On August 14, 1976, just after graduating from Princeton, Sotomayor married Kevin Edward Noonan, whom she had dated since high school, in a small chapel at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.