Who is Sonia Sotomayor?

She spent her life being told she wasn’t good enough — and used it to fuel her way to the court

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During a recruitment dinner held during Sonia Sotomayor’s third year of law school, a partner from a Washington-based firm asked her if she got into Yale because she was Puerto Rican. 

Sotomayor, who was applying for a job at the firm, was shocked by the question. Her resume, she felt, spoke for itself. But the recruiter didn’t stop there. “Do you believe in affirmative action?” he asked. “ Do law firms do themselves and young lawyers a disservice by hiring minority students who the firms believe lack the necessary credentials?” 

Sotomayor answered his questions politely, as her mother had taught her to do. But the words cut deep.

It was a familiar feeling to someone whose intelligence had been questioned, it seemed, her entire life. She later said it was “very, very painful that people kept accusing me of not being smart enough.” 

That night, as the words of the recruiter echoed in her head, Sotomayor realized she could do something about it.  

The next day, Sotomayor confronted the recruiter during her official interview with the firm. He was surprised she was upset, because Sotomayor “hadn’t made a scene” the day before. Sotomayor said it was clear he expected a stereotypical emotional Latina. Instead, she told him, “Don’t mistake politeness for lack of strength.”

Instead of letting the doubts of others discourage her, she let it fuel her trajectory to the United States Supreme Court. 

Welcome to our series on the nine Supreme Court Justices. This week is focused on Sonia Sotomayor. Join us each week for another installment. 

Sotomayor’s mother and father were both born in Puerto Rico, and moved to the Bronx, New York during World War II. Sotomayor was born in 1954 into their Spanish-speaking household. 

Her mother was a nurse who worked six days a week, and in her spare time, volunteered to help people in the neighborhood. She was out of the house a lot, which meant Sotomayor was usually with her brother, or alcoholic father. The combination meant that Sotomayor was left to fend for herself most of the time. She felt neglected and abandoned at home. 

Then, around age seven, Sotomayor started feeling thirsty all the time. She fainted in church. When she was taken to the hospital, she was diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes. 

Her mother was devastated. At the time, diabetes meant you might not live to middle age. The day after her diagnosis, she woke up to her parents arguing about who would have to give her the insulin shots. They both wanted the other to do it – her dad said Sotomayor’s mom should, because she was a nurse. Her mother was saying Sotomayor’s father would have to learn how to give the shots. 

Listening to them fighting, Sotomayor realized something that would stick with her forever: the only one she could count on was herself. So she pulled up a chair near the stove, boiled some water, dropped in her syringe and needle into (they were glass and metal), and gave herself a shot.

And at age nine, Sotomayor was dealt another blow when her 42-year-old father died from a heart attack. Her mom, in order to make more money, went back to school to get a higher degree, which meant she spent even less time at home. When she was home, Sotomayor’s mother would go straight into her room and stay there after work. 

Young Sonia found an escape in books and TV. She loved Perry Mason. While watching the show, Sotomayor said she realized “the most important person in that room was the judge. I wanted to be that person.”

She knew the only way to get there was to improve her grades, so she asked the smartest girl in the school for help. In high school, friends remembered Sonia as shy and reserved at first, but once you got to know her, she’d love to “hold court” in the cafeteria. Like many other Supreme Court justices, she was part of the debate team and student council. She was seen as a leader, someone who was going places. She was the class valedictorian. 

Then, she went to college, and the world as she knew it was flipped upside down. 

Sotomayor was admitted to Princeton in 1972 under an affirmative action program (Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito also attended Princeton as undergrads). 

Sotomayor was one of only a few female students and even fewer Latinas on campus. She felt like "a visitor landing in an alien country.” She no longer had her community around her, and school itself was more challenging than she’d ever experienced. Though she had graduated the top of her class in high school, her test scores weren’t comparable to other students, according to Sotomayor, and her writing and vocabulary were weaker than her fellow classmates. 

She reverted back to being the quiet girl. Not only were her grades poor but she felt her presence on campus was unwanted — the school paper was frequently publishing letters from students complaining about students who were there under affirmative action. 

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Sotomayor turned to history professor Peter Winn, who became her mentor. He wrote of her, “She did not radiate charm or magnetism, nor was she polished or cool. But she had an appealing sincerity and directness, and there was something centered about her that was unusual among first year minority students at Princeton.” 

Sotomayor started reading and studying grammar during her vacations. She spent hours in the library. She said her mantra became, “How am I not going to let this beat me?” 

As her grades started to improve, Sotomayor became involved in Latina and minority student groups on campus. These groups, Sotomayor said, “provided me with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world.” 

Sotomayor graduated Princeton with honors. She moved on to Yale Law School, again through an affirmative action program. 

After her second year, another “kick in the teeth” occurred. Sotomayor had earned a summer associate job at a law firm, but wasn’t offered the opportunity to return after graduation, as many other associates were. She viewed the lack of job offer as a massive failure, and she was devastated. 

So she took classes to better her skill in writing legal briefs, and became the editor of the Yale Law Review. By the time she attended the recruitment dinner at Shaw Pittman, she was secure in her worth. But when the recruiter questioned her intelligence and why she was at Yale, it proved she needed to do more to convince the people around her that she deserved a seat at the table.

After graduation in 1979, Sotomayor got a job as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. She worked 15-hour days prosecuting robbery, assault, murder, police brutality, and child pornography cases. 

The work was exhausting. She eventually left the DA’s office in 1983, and joined a commercial firm, Pavia & Harcourt, because she wanted to “complete [herself] as an attorney.” A colleague later said that Sotomayor “would really bore in and make sure there was nothing about the case that she didn't understand." 

While at the firm, she broadened her experience by joining New York City’s Campaign Finance Board and sat on the  board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. Because of her lived experiences, including seeing “good people do bad things,” Sotomayor had grown to believe that the law impacted everyone, and maintained a strong faith in courts and institutions as a way to help others. And she never gave up on her dream of becoming a judge. 

She started to move in that direction in 1990. 

That year, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan pushed George H.W. Bush to nominate more liberal judges to the courts. 

She met with Moynihan, and by the end of the interview, Moynihan said he’d put Sotomayor’s name up as a trial judge. She was “unflappable and completely poised … [she] knocked [Moynihan’s] socks off,” said Joseph Gale, then a staff counsel for Moynihan. 

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

George HW Bush listened to the Senators from NY, and nominated Sotomayor in 1991. Eighteen months later, she became the first Latina on a federal court in New York and the first Puerto Rican woman to serve as a judge in the federal judiciary.

Years later, Moynihan again pushed for Sotomayor, recommending her to President Bill Clinton for the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1997, and Clinton advanced her nomination.

The Republican-run Senate initially didn’t want to confirm Sotomayor to this new role. First, they thought she was too liberal, and they were worried nominating Sotomayor to the appeals court would put her on the fast-track to the Supreme Court. They were concerned that she wouldn’t be unbiased, because she had previously said judges’ personal experiences can affect their decision making. 

Nevertheless, she was confirmed on Oct. 2, 1998. 

During her years on the appeals court, Sotomayor became known for asking tough questions from the bench. Some lawyers called her brilliant, others called her a bully and complained she had a “domineering presence on the bench,” according to a Washington Post article. 

When Barack Obama became president in 2008, Sotomayor started asking for advice on getting a Supreme Court nomination from Carolos Ortiz, who was the former president of the Hispanic National Bar Association and spent nearly 20 years advocating for presidents to nominate a Hispanic justice. Ortiz told her to use the connections she had, and so that’s what she did. Two former colleagues got her a meeting at the White House, and when Justice David Souter said he was retiring in 2009, Sotomayor's name was added to the short list. 

She wasn’t everyone’s first choice. An adviser to Obama, Laurence Tribe, said, “Bluntly put, she’s not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is, and her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire and simply add to the firepower of the [conservative] wing of the court.” During the nomination process, NPR listened to the recording of two cases Sotomayor oversaw. NPR said they were tough questions, but no more “mean, unduly snotty, or abusive” than the questions “heard on a routine basis in the Supreme Court.”

(Tribe later changed his mind about Sotomayor, eventually saying, “I was totally wrong in ever doubting how strong a Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor would be.”) 

Sotomayor later said it was “very, very painful both on the court of appeals and on the Supreme Court nomination process that people kept accusing me of not being smart enough. Now, could someone explain to me, other than that I’m Hispanic, why that would be?”

But Obama was impressed that Sotomayor had top grades from Princeton and Yale, that she stayed connected to her Puerto Rican community, and had not forgotten her roots. 

Her interviews with Obama and Vice President Joe Biden went well, and she was told that the president would make his decision sometime on May 25, 2009.

On May 25, she went to her office at 8am to wait for the call. Every time the phone would ring, she’d get her hopes up. But it was only impatient family members, calling to see if she had news or if they should arrange travel to DC. “I don’t know,” she kept saying, “I don’t know.” 

Sotomayor couldn’t take it anymore. So she called the president herself. She was told Obama had gotten distracted with some things, and he’d call back at 8pm.

At 8:10pm, her phone rang. Sotomayor held the phone up to her ear and heard Obama say, “Judge, I would like to announce you as my selection to be the next associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.” She began to cry.

She was officially nominated on May 26, 2009 and was confirmed on August 6, 2009. Two days later, she was sworn in. 

In the years since, she’s become one of the most well-known justices on the court, in part for reading her dissents aloud. When the court reversed affirmative action at Harvard, Sotomayor read from the bench: “Today, this court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.” She said that race “has always mattered and continues to matter,” and that the decision “subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education.”

The same year, after the court ruled in favor of a web designer from Colorado who said the First Amendment protected her from being forced to make a website for a gay couple, Sotomayor again read from the bench: “Around the country, there has been a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities. New forms of inclusion have been met with reactionary exclusion. This is heartbreaking. Sadly, it is also familiar.”

Off the bench, Sotomayor has also made millions selling her memoir and children's books, and some of those sales have raised ethical questions. An investigation by The Associated Press last year revealed that Sotomayor’s staff often urged public institutions that host Sotomayor as a speaker to also buy her books. 

Members of Congress and the executive branch are not allowed to use government resources, including staff, for any sort of personal financial gain. Lower federal court judges are also told to not “lend the prestige of the judicial office to advance” their “private interests.”

The Supreme Court does not have the same rule, because they do not have a formal code of conduct or enforceable ethics code. Documents show that Sotomayor’s staff frequently organizes talks intended to sell books. 

In response to the AP investigation, the Supreme Court said, “When (Sotomayor) is invited to participate in a book program, Chambers staff recommends the number of books (for an organization to order) based on the size of the audience so as not to disappoint attendees who may anticipate books being available at an event.”

Sotomayor spent her life feeling unremarkable. Now, she lets her personality shine through, even if it means she doesn’t follow the same playbook as all the other justices. After her first term, she began salsa dancing at the usually buttoned-up afterparty, forcing every single justice to join her for a spin.

After being told for years that she didn’t deserve the success she had worked for, she is the most senior liberal justice on the court, and she’s not backing down.