Learn about Obama's pick - Sonia Sotomayor

Sonia Sotomayor is a federal appeals judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit based in New York City. She was nominated to this position by Bill Clinton on June 25, 1997 and received her commission on October 7, 1998.

Sotomayor, who grew up in a public housing project in the Bronx, is of Puerto Rican descent. Her father was a manual laborer who did not attend high school and who died when Sotomayor was nine years old, a year after she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. Her mother, a nurse, supported Sotomayor's educational goals. Sotomayor, who is divorced, has no children.

If Sotomayor is appointed to the court, she will be the third woman ever to serve on the Supreme Court (after O'Connor and Ginsburg) as well as the court's first justice of Hispanic descent.

Sotomayor did her undergraduate work at Princeton, graduating summa cum laude in 1976, and then went on to law school at Yale Law, where she was awarded her Juris Doctor degree in 1979. She then began her legal career working from 1979-1984 as an assistant District Attorney with the District Attorney's Office of New York County. In 1984, she took up the private practice of law in New York City at the law firm of Pavia & Harcourt continuing in private practice through 1992 when she joined the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

On the recommendation of U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moniyhan, Sotomayor was nominated by President George H.W. Bush on November 27, 1991, to a seat on the Southern District of New York vacated by John Walker as Walker assumed senior status. Sotomayor was confirmed by the US Senate on August 11, 1992 on unanimous consent of the Senate and received commission on August 12, 1992. When she joined the court, she was its youngest judge.

Sotomayor left the Southern District of New York on October 13, 1998 due to her appointment to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

On the recommendation of U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moniyhan, Sotomayor was nominated by President Bill Clinton on June 25, 1997 to a seat vacated by Daniel Mahoney. Sotomayor was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on October 2, 1998 on a super majority 67-29-2 vote, receiving her commission on October 7, 1998.

In February 2009, in an article Esquire magazine, she was described as a one-of-a-kind nominee who "would slay two of the court's lack-of-diversity birds with one swift stone."