Sonia Sotomayor

Sonia Sotomayor married her high-school sweetheart Kevin Edward Noonan on August 14, 1976, at a small chapel in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, only days after she received her graduation degree from Princeton. Noonan later got a degree in biology and became a scientist and patent lawyer. After the marriage, Sonia began using her married name, Sonia Sotomayor de Noonan. They were married for seven years and did not have any children. In 1983, they divorced. The separation was quite amicable.

In 2013, Sotomayor published her memoir, titled ‘My Beloved World’, through Alfred A. Knopf.

She has been a life-long fan of the New York Yankees.

Sonia Sotomayor was born on June 25, 1954, in The Bronx, New York City, to Juan Sotomayor and Celina Báez. She has a brother, also named Juan Sotomayor, who has worked as a physician and university professor in the Syracuse, New York, area.

Her parents, who were from Puerto Rico, had moved out of the island separately. They eventually met and got married during the World War II in the US. Celina served in the war as a member of the Women’s Army Corps. After the war, she found employment as a telephone operator and then a practical nurse. On the other hand, Juan Sr.’s education did not proceed beyond the third grade. He could not speak English and spent his life working as a tool and die worker.

As a child, Sotomayor lived in the Puerto Rican communities in the South Bronx and East Bronx. She grew up in a Catholic home and later came to identify herself as a “Nuyorican", a portmanteau of the terms "New York" and "Puerto Rican". Initially, the family stayed in a South Bronx tenement and in 1957, relocated to the well-maintained, racially and ethnically mixed, working-class Bronxdale Houses housing project in Soundview.

While she had been an exemplary student throughout her academic life, she had various problems at her home. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother was emotionally distant. In those years, the only adult with whom she had a close bond was her grandmother. Sotomayor later stated that her grandmother was the source of “protection and purpose” for her. At the age of seven, she found out that she had type 1 diabetes and immediately started taking insulin injections.

She lost her father when she was nine years old. Her mother remained distant throughout her young life and the relationship between them would not improve until she was well into her adulthood. However, Celina performed all her duties as a single parent to both her children. She valued education tremendously and got the Encyclopædia Britannica for her children, something that was unheard of in the housing projects back then.

Sonia Sotomayor enrolled at the Princeton University on full scholarship in 1972. She later acknowledged that she received the admission partly due to her academic background and party because of affirmative action, which compensated for her standardized test scores not being as good as those of other applicants. Affirmative action would become one of the most important issues for her during her judicial career.

During the early months at Princeton, she struggled to assimilate. There was a significant cultural shock as Princeton only had a few women students. The number of Latino students was even fewer than that. She had issues with writing and vocabulary and did not possess enough knowledge of the classics. So she worked hard, spending long hours in the library and got a professor to help her out during the summer.

This was the time when her political opinions began to develop. She was elected to co-chair the Acción Puertorriqueña, a student organization dedicated to building a large, united and healthy Puerto Rican community with a strong cultural identity in the Princeton campus.

She led the movement that brought a Latino faculty to Princeton. Sotomayor was also active outside the school. She helmed an after-school program for local children and served as an interpreter for the Latino patients at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital.

In 1976, Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and enrolled at the Yale Law School in the fall of 1976, again on a scholarship. Unlike Princeton, she had no problem adapting to the life at Yale. In fact, she thrived. While she was not one of the star students of her classes, she maintained good grades and was very active on the campus. She co-chaired a group for Latin, Asian, and Native American students and continued to advocate for hiring Hispanic faculty.

Straight out of law school, in 1979, Sonia Sotomayor landed the job of an assistant district attorney under New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. The response to her appointment from her community was conflicting, so were the emotions within her. She had to overcome her inherent shyness and muster enough courage to venture into rough neighbourhoods to interview witnesses.

In 1983, she was instrumental in convicting the “Tarzan Murderer”, who gained notoriety in the early 1980s for entering into people’s apartments acrobatically and proceeding to rob and shoot the occupants.

In 1984, she became an associate at a commercial litigation practice group named Pavia & Harcourt. While she had no prior experience in civil litigation, she learned on the job as her firm used her extensively. She was also involved in visible public service roles.

Despite not being connected to either political party as she was a registered independent, she held several important positions in the state government, including as one of the founding members of the New York City Campaign Finance Board from 1988 to 1992. Between 1980 and 1992, she served on the board of directors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.