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Revision as of 07:39, 10 April 2006 by Smashingworth (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Sonia Sotomayor is a judge on the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
She was born in 1954 in The Bronx, New York.
After graduating with a B.A. from Princeton University in 1976, she obtained her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979.
Sotomayor then served as an Assistant District Attorney for the New York County District Attorney's Office until 1984, when she entered private practice in New York City.
On November 27, 1991, she was nominated by President George H.W. Bush to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by John M. Walker, Jr. (the president's cousin.) She was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 11, 1992, and received commission the next day.
On March 30, 1995, she issued the preliminary injunction against Major League Baseball, preventing MLB from unilaterally implementing a new Collective Bargaining Agreement and using replacement players, thus ending the 1994 baseball strike.
On June 25, 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the seat she now holds, which was vacated by J. Daniel Mahoney.
Confirmation battle
Her nomination became a source of controversy when it was contested by a number of conservative media outlets and organizations, including the Wall Street Journal, which called her a "liberal", and the Free Congress Foundation, which called her a "judicial activist" based on a number of her decisions and writings, including her assertion that law can and should "evolve" as a result of judicial decisions without amendment by the people or their elected representatives. Many conservatives feared that, if confirmed to the appellate bench, she would be on the fast track to a U.S. Supreme Court appointment, in part because she would be the first Hispanic woman on the high court.
Indeed, Senate Democrats emphasized her sex and race in the nomination debate. Senator Patrick Leahy, pointing to other Hispanic Clinton nominees who had been blocked by the GOP, implied that opponents of her confirmation were opposed to Hispanics achieving high judicial office.
After months of controversy, then-Majority Leader Trent Lott scheduled a vote on her nomination with little advance notice, angering conservatives who saw Lott as clearing a path for her confirmation and being too accommodating to Clinton. With solid Democratic support, and Republicans divided roughly equally, she was confirmed on October 2, 1998, and she received commission on October 7.
O'Connor seat
In July 2005, a number of Senate Democrats suggested Sotomayor, among others, to President George W. Bush as a nominee acceptable to them to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. The suggestion was criticized in the conservative magazine National Review as being in bad faith, because it allegedly reflected a lack of effort to suggest nominees whom Bush could also support.