Sonia Sotomayor
US Supreme Court justice
Sonia Sotomayor is an associate justice of the US Supreme Court, serving since 2009. She tells her life story in the memoir My Beloved World.
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American Born 1954 in The Bronx, United States
About Sonia Sotomayor
Sonia Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York City, on June 25, 1954, to parents born in Puerto Rico. Her father died when she was nine, and her mother raised her. She grew up in New York City housing projects, in a home where her parents did not speak English. Scholarships took her to both Princeton University and Yale Law School. She graduated from Princeton in 1976 and received her law degree in 1979, and she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She then worked as an assistant district attorney in New York before moving into private practice, where she became a partner at Pavia & Harcourt. She became a federal district judge in New York in 1992 and joined the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1998. President Barack Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court in 2009, and she took her seat on August 8, 2009. She is the first Hispanic justice and the third woman to serve on the Court.