Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as the 111th Supreme Court Justice by the U.S. Senate in a 68-31 victory in August. Since 1999, she has been a Columbia lecturer in law, an adjunct faculty post at Columbia Law School.
Sotomayor will be the nation’s first Hispanic justice, succeeding Justice David Souter.
“With this historic vote, the Senate has affirmed that Judge Sotomayor has the intellect, the temperament, the history, the integrity, and the independence of mind to ably serve on our nation’s highest court,” President Barack Obama, CC ’83, said shortly after the Senate confirmed his pick.
According to an earlier statement from Columbia Law School, Sotomayor “created and has co-taught a course called the Federal Appellate Externship every semester since fall 2000. This course combines intensive work in the chambers of a Second Circuit Judge with class sessions and a moot court exercise.”
Raised by Puerto Rican parents in Bronx public housing projects, Sotomayor has sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit for 16 years. Following her undergraduate years at Princeton, she began her law career as a student at Yale Law School where she served as an editor of the “Yale Law Journal.”
Later, she worked for Robert Morgenthau in the New York district attorney’s office. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush nominated her to the federal district court, and she was confirmed a year later. President Bill Clinton elevated Sotomayor to the Federal Court of Appeals, for which she was confirmed in 1998.
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