Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was born on June 25th 1954 in the South Bronx area of New York to parents Juan and Celina Baez Sotomayor. Her parents who were of Puerto Rican descent moved their family to New York for a better opportunity for their children. Her parents worked hard to make a living her mother was a nurse a methadone clinic and her father worked with his hands and the family lived modestly within their means. Justice Sotomayor was diagnosed with type one diabetes at the age of seven and began taking insulin shot’s, shortly after her father died in 1963 when she was nine, leaving her mother as a single parent, during her upbringing her mother Celina placed a huge emphasis on the importance of education, pushing her children to become

Justice Sotomayor passed the entrance exam and gained admission to Cardinal Spellman High School where she attended for 4 years, during her time there she was elected as a member of the student government and was a member of the schools forensic team. She graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School in 1972 as class valedictorian. Immediately after graduating she was accepted into the Ivy League Princeton University on a full scholarship, She stated at the age of ten that “ I was going to college and I was going to became an attorney” so Princeton was just the beginning. Her first year was pretty tough at Princeton, she quickly became swamped after she received her first midterm paper and she had made really low scores, she then decided to get help with her English, reading and writing. While attending Princeton Justice Sotomayor worked for the universities discipline committee, shaping her for her legal future, she also became increasingly involved on campus she became a moderate student activist and joined Puerto Rican organizations like Acción Puertorriqueña, which means Puerto Rican action, where she became the co-chair and the Third World Center, these groups provided her “with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world” Justice Sotomayor stated. Justice Sotomayor’s first interests in the justice system began after she watched an episode of the show Perry Manson, in this particular episode the prosecutor had stated he did not mind loosing when a defendant turned out to be innocent. Justice Sotomayor then later said in an interview that she “made the quantum leap that if that was the prosecutors job the she wanted to be the person who made the decision to dismiss the