Repeating Islands

President Obama has nominated the federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Daughter of Puerto Rican parents and raised in the raised in a Bronx, New York, Judge Sotomayor credited her mother, Celina Sotomayor for her own success. “I am all I am because of her,” Judge Sotomayor said, “and I am only half the woman she is.”

 Judge Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University, where she was a co-recipient of the M. Taylor Pyne Prize, the highest honor Princeton awards to an undergraduate. She earned her J.D. at Yale Law School, where served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and as managing editor of the Yale Studies in World Public Order.

The New York Times reports that, if elected, she would become the nation’s first Hispanic justice. The president said he had made his decision after “deep reflection and careful deliberation,” and he made it clear that the judge’s inspiring personal story was crucial in his decision. Mr. Obama praised his choice as someone possessing “a rigorous intellect, a mastery of the law.” Quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mr. Obama said, “The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience,” adding that it is vitally important that a justice know “how the world works, and how ordinary people live,” the president said.

As Peter Baker and Jeff Zeleny expressed, “Her life story, mirroring in some ways Mr. Obama’s own, would add a different complexion to the panel, fulfilling the president’s stated desire to add diversity of background to the nation’s highest tribunal. Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy stated that having a Supreme Court that better reflects the diversity of America will help to “ensure that we keep faith with the words engraved in Vermont marble over the entrance of the Supreme Court: ‘Equal justice under law.’”

For full article (in English), see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/politics/27court.html?ref=global-home

Also see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/26/sonia-sotomayor-10-things_n_207724.html

Photo from http://www.latina.com/lifestyle/news-politics/sonia-sotomayor-front-runner-supreme-court-justice