Years before Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor became the first Latina to serve on the high court, she aspired to become a police officer in the Bronx. But she realized she had a calling to the legal world while watching “Perry Mason.”
“That TV character said something that molded my life,” Sotomayor said at her confirmation hearing in 2009, referring to the quote from the show. “Justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and when an innocent man is not.”
The road to the Supreme Court was not without obstacles for Sotomayor. Her father, Juan, passed away when she was 9. Her mother, Celina, worked six days a week as a nurse, and put her children through private Catholic school.
Sotomayor attended Princeton University, where she honored her Puerto Rican background. She served as co-chair of Accion Puertorriquena, a Puerto Rican activist group, and wrote her senior thesis on the first elected governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín.
She later received her law degree from Yale Law School, and worked for famous New York prosecutor Robert Morgenthau when she was 25. Years later, she was appointed by former President George H.W. Bush to the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, where she ended a 232-day baseball strike in Silverman v. Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee, Inc. in 1995.
Former President Obama nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court in 2009 to replace retired Justice David Souter. She was confirmed by the Senate in a 68-31 vote, making her just the third woman to hold a seat on the highest court in the land.
— Julia Manchester
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