rk City, New York, on june 25, 1954. Her parents, sonia and celinar sotomayor, were Puerto Rican immigrant. Her mother was a nurse at a methadone clinic and her father was a tool-and-die worker who died when sotomayor was only nine years old.Sotomayor mother raise the children as a single parent. She place what sotomayo would later call an almost fanatical on a higher education, pushing the children to become fluent in english and struggling to afford a set of encyclopedias to give them proper reseach materials for school.
Sotomayor graduated from cardinal spellman high school in the Bronx in the 1972 and entered the ivy-league Princeton University. She also become highly involved with the Puerto Rican groups on campus, including Accion Puertorriquena and The Third World Center. she also worked with the University's discipline committee, where she started working on her legal skills. All of sotomayor's hard work paid off when she graduated summa cum laude from Princenton in 1976. She was also awarded the Pyne Prize, which is the highest academic award given to Princeton undegraduates. That same year, Sotomayor entered Yale law school, where she wa an editor for the Yale Law Journal. Sotomayor was reponsible for prosecuting robberies, assaults, murders, police brutality and child pornography cases. When she joined the court, she was its youngest judge. On october 3,1998, she was elected to the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President William Clinton.
In addition to her work in the Court of Appeals, Sotomayor also began teaching adjunct law at New York University in 1998 and at Columbia Law School in 1999. She has also received honorary law degrees from Herber H. Lehman College, Princeton University, and Brooklyn Law School. She also serves on the board of Trustees at Princeton. On may 26, 2009, President Barack Obama announced his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court Justice. If the nomination is approved by the U.S Senate, Sotomayor would become the first Latina Supreme Court Justice.
