Sonia Sotomayor Appointed to Supreme Court

| By J. Robert Parks |

The growing influence of women and people of color has often been noted by their ascension to positions of power: the first governor, the first U.S. senator, and the first Supreme Court justice. The first Black Supreme Court justice was Thurgood Marshall in 1967, while the first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, wasn’t confirmed until 1981. Those two were decades ahead, however, of the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, which didn’t happen until 2009. This week marks the 15th anniversary of Sonia Sotomayor taking her place on the Supreme Court bench on August 8, 2009. Educators and librarians who are looking to celebrate Sotomayor’s achievements will find a wealth of resources in Gale In Context: U.S. History.

Hispanic Americans faced significant discrimination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the first Hispanic U.S. senator to serve a full term, Dennis Chávez, did so starting in the 1930s, Hispanic politicians were frequently seen as outsiders. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the increasing number of Hispanic American citizens in the 1970s and 1980s started to change that, both in perception and reality.

Nonetheless, the increasing prominence of Hispanics in America did not immediately lead to a place on the Supreme Court. Part of the reason was the simple fact that there were only two openings on the Court from 1995 to 2008, both of which came during George W. Bush’s administration, and he nominated two white men. Barack Obama, however, had an opportunity early in his first term, and he nominated Sonia Sotomayor.

Sotomayor had been considered a leading candidate for the Court since at least the late 1990s, and Republican senators had delayed her elevation to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1998 because they hoped to forestall that possibility. When Obama nominated her for the Supreme Court in 2009, many conservatives looked for anything that might derail her nomination. Many seized on a speech Sotomayor had given in 2001 where she discussed the importance of diversity in the justice system. She said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Conservative columnists, most of them white men, took umbrage.

During the confirmation hearings that followed, Sotomayor went out of her way to emphasize that justices should decide each case on its merit and not bring in their own personal background or experiences to their decision. For some liberals, this seemed like a walking back of Sotomayor’s principles. Nonetheless, her statements satisfied many Republicans, and she was confirmed by a vote of 68 to 31. Ramona Romero, of the Hispanic National Bar Association, stated that the vote was a “reaffirmation that we Latinos can be recognized as contributing members of our society and that there are no limits to what we can achieve.”

Sotomayor quickly established herself as a forceful justice who stood for liberal principles and particularly the importance of the justice system in protecting the rights of the poor and vulnerable. During her time on the bench, she and the other liberal justices have largely been in the minority, so many of her strongest opinions have been dissents. One especially powerful argument came last year when she decried Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion that struck down race-conscious programs in college admissions.

History can help students realize that apparent novelties have been true for decades. But history can also reveal the opposite—that what seems as if it’s been present for years is relatively new. Sotomayor has been sitting on the Supreme Court bench for only 15 years, which is a reminder that the prominence of Hispanic Americans in positions of judicial power is an unfortunately recent phenomenon, but her achievements can nonetheless be an inspiration to all young people.

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