First Hispanic in the US Supreme Court

Obama has recently nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the United States Supreme Court, if approved by United States Congress, she will be the first Hispanic ever in the United States Supreme Court.

Sonia Sotomayor (born June 25, 1954) is a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. On May 26, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Judge Sotomayor for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter.[2][3] Sotomayor is of Puerto Rican descent, and was born in the Bronx. Her father died when she was nine, and she was raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated with a B.A., Summa Cum Laude, from Princeton in 1976, and received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. She worked as an Assistant District Attorney in New York for a time before entering private practice in 1984. Considered a political centrist, Sotomayor was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in 1991 and confirmed in 1992.

Sotomayor has ruled on several high profile cases. In 1995, she issued the preliminary injunction against Major League Baseball which ended the 1994 Baseball Strike. Sotomayor made a ruling allowing the Wall Street Journal to publish Vince Foster's suicide note. In 1997, she was nominated by Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. After more than a year, she was confirmed and joined the court in 1998. Sotomayor was an Adjunct Professor at New York University School of Law from 1998 to 2007 and has been a lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School since 1999.