How old is sotomayor today

Celina Sotomayor held the Bible when her daughter took the judicial oath, administered by Chief Justice John Roberts, to serve as the first Latina Supreme Court justice. In , after marrying Omar R. Lopez, Celina Sotomayor moved to Florida. She leaves behind her children and grandchildren, Kiley, Connor and Corey, according to a family friend.

In , she was confirmed as the first Latina Supreme Court justice in U. Sotomayor's family functioned on a very modest income — her mother was a nurse at a methadone clinic, and her father was a tool-and-die worker.

Sotomayor's first leanings toward the justice system began after watching an episode of the television show Perry Mason.

When a prosecutor on the program said he did not mind losing when a defendant turned out to be innocent, Sotomayor later said to The New York Times that she "made the quantum leap: If that was the prosecutor's job, then the guy who made the decision to dismiss the case was the judge. That was what I was going to be. When her husband died in , Celina worked hard to raise her children as a single parent. She placed what Sotomayor would later call an "almost fanatical emphasis" on a higher education, pushing the children to become fluent in English and making huge sacrifices to purchase a set of encyclopedias that would give them proper research materials for school.

The young Latina woman felt overwhelmed by her new school; after she received low marks on first mid-term paper, she sought help, taking more English and writing classes. The groups, she said, provided her "with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world. All of Sotomayor's hard work paid off when she graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in She was also awarded the Pyne Prize, which is the highest academic award given to Princeton undergraduates.

She received her J. Sotomayor was responsible for prosecuting robbery, assault, murder, police brutality and child pornography cases. She moved from associate to partner at the firm in Sotomayor's pro bono work at these agencies caught the attention of Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who were partially responsible for her appointment as U. President George H. Bush nominated her for the position in , which was confirmed unanimously by the Senate on August 11, She tended to be more conservative in criminal cases, where Supreme Court precedent encourages appellate judges to be pro-prosecution.

On civil rights issues such as race, gender, and immigration, on the other hand, Lindquist's study found that Sotomayor tended to be more liberal. Sotomayor joined a finding in favor of the city of New Haven rejecting a lawsuit filed by 17 white firefighters and one Hispanic firefighter claiming race discrimination by the city. New Haven denied promotions following a promotion examination that yielded no black candidates eligible for advancement.

In a decision, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the decision, stating the decision to cancel the promotions violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act , which guarantees equal employment opportunity. The court found that Sotomayor's ruling would allow the city to "experiment" with tests until they found one that produced "a more desirable racial distribution.

Sotomayor found in favor of environmental group Riverkeeper, which challenged an EPA ruling on the Clean Water Act's "best technology" rule involving power plants' need to intake water as weighed against the risk to aquatic life in surrounding waters. In her ruling, she held: "Congress has already specified the relationship between cost and benefits in requiring that the technology designated by EPA be the best available.

Bush R —Sotomayor found that the federal government is within its rights to deny federal aid to foreign organizations that support or perform abortions. She dismissed claims by the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy that the Mexico City Policy violated the First Amendment right to association as well as Fifth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection. In her finding, Sotomayor cited the Foreign Assistance Act of , which authorizes the president "to furnish assistance, on such terms and conditions as he may determine, for voluntary population planning," as well as multiple Supreme Court precedents.

In her decision, Sotomayor wrote, "The Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds. In this case, Sotomayor found that an inmate living in a halfway house could sue a government contractor for forcing him to climb five flights of stairs despite a heart condition after the inmate suffered a heart attack, fell down the stairs, and injured himself. Sotomayor held "extending Bivens liability to reach private corporations furthers [its] overriding purpose: providing redress for violations of constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court overturned Sotomayor's decision in a 5 to 4 ruling, stating that only individual agents, not corporations, could be sued for such violations. Sotomayor wrote several high-profile rulings regarding the Major League Baseball strike of , the Wall Street Journal' s publishing of the suicide note left by former Clinton White House counsel Vince Foster, and copyright issues related to a trivia book about the television show Seinfeld.

As a federal district judge, Sotomayor had one of her decisions overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States. The case is often used in law schools as a modern application of the fair use doctrine. Sotomayor ruled in favor of The New York Times when it was sued by freelance journalists claiming the newspaper did not have the right to include their work in the electronic archival database LexisNexis.

Judge Sotomayor's decision to grant a temporary injunction against the Major League Baseball owners on March 31, , ended the day baseball strike of The injunction prevented the owners from installing replacement players and temporarily reinstated a five-year-old collective bargaining agreement allowing the season to take place and allowing players and owners to come to a new agreement nearly a year later.

In , Judge Sotomayor ruled in favor of the Wall Street Journal , allowing the newspaper to print a photocopy of the final note written by Clinton White House deputy counsel Vince Foster, who died in Sotomayor ruled that the public interest in the Foster story outweighed any violation of his family's privacy. The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court.

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