President names first Hispanic high court nominee
WASHINGTON -- President Obama's historic choice of appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor would give the nation's highest court its first Hispanic voice, a second female perspective and, for the first time in nearly two decades, the experience of an individual from a truly humble background.
Sotomayor, 54, from a Puerto Rican family, was raised in a housing project in the Bronx. Her father died when she was 9. Her mother worked six days a week as a nurse to support her daughter and son, now a doctor in Syracuse, N.Y. Sotomayor won a scholarship to Princeton and then attended Yale Law School.
Obama, at the White House with Sotomayor at his side, called her an "inspiring woman who I believe will make a great justice."
"My heart today is bursting with gratitude," Sotomayor said. "I stand on the shoulders of countless people." She singled out her mother as her "life aspiration."
"I am all that I am because of her, and I am only half the woman she is," Sotomayor said as her mother looked on from the front row.
Obama noted that the legal career of Sotomayor, who would succeed retiring Justice David Souter, includes tenure as a New York prosecutor, corporate litigator and trial judge (appointed by the first President Bush in 1992) before becoming an appeals court judge (elevated by President Clinton in 1998).
Obama said she has the depth of legal experience necessary for the high court.
"Along the way, she's faced down barriers, overcome the odds and lived out the American dream that brought her parents here so long ago," he said.
All nine of the current justices are former federal appeals court judges. As a sitting judge, Sotomayor would not break that pattern. Yet her distinct background would bring the kind of "quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles" that Obama has said he was seeking.
Not since the 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas, born in poverty near Savannah and reared by grandparents, has a nominee overcome such personal odds.
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