Um artigo de Keith Richburg, no Washington Post:
Sonia Sotomayor's journey to a seat on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit began in a public housing project in the Bronx in the 1950s, as the neighborhood was changing from majority white to predominantly Puerto Rican.
Sotomayor's father died when she was 9, leaving her mother to raise her and her brother alone on a nurse's salary. But her mother instilled in the two children a strong ethic of hard work and the importance of education. After graduating from a Catholic high school, Sotomayor attended Princeton University, where she graduated summa cum laude, and then Yale Law School.
At Yale, her classmates recall a young woman with a brilliant legal mind who was tough when arguing for her views. And although they said she never forgot her modest background, and always identified with the disadvantaged, her main passion was for the law, not a particular political agenda.
Most legal analysts expect Sotomayor -- who White House officials say will be announced this morning as President Obama's nominee to replace retiring Justice David Souter -- would be a solid vote for the Supreme Court's liberal wing. But those who know her said she would come to decisions through reason and carefully researched arguments, not ideology -- a trait they saw developing in the young law student.
"She's really tough to pigeonhole," said Susan Sturm, a Columbia Law School professor and a colleague of Sotomayor's from the Yale Law class of 1979. "This is something I saw evolving over time." Sturm added, "She does not have an ideological litmus test for her clerks. They run the gamut."
Robert Klonoff, another classmate and friend of Sotomayor's who is now dean of the Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, said she "was tenacious, she was absolutely brilliant."
At Yale, in the 1970s, a woman of Puerto Rican descent sometimes saw double discrimination, and Klonoff said that "she and I back in law school days talked about how difficult it was for someone" of her background. He said Sotomayor gave him an "understanding, in a way I hadn't before, the hurdles someone has to overcome, even when they're a student at Yale."
As editor of the Yale Law Journal, Sotomayor published a student "note" on the topic of what would happen to Puerto Rico's mineral rights if the commonwealth were admitted as a U.S. state. "At the time, it was a very divisive issue," said Yale Law professor Stephen Carter, a classmate who edited the note. "It was a very thoughtful piece and a very even-handed piece."
"Thirty years ago writing a student note, she was showing a very even-handed way of resolving" issues, Carter said. Now in his classes, Carter said he teaches two of Sotomayor's judicial opinions to his students.
After Yale, Sotomayor went to the Manhattan district attorney's office, under the legendary prosecutor Robert Morgenthau, where she prosecuted a range of criminal cases.
In 1984, George Pavia, a New York lawyer representing Fiat and other Italian business clients, said he was looking for a young lawyer with courtroom experience to help with products liability cases. He said he found Sotomayor "just ideal for us in terms of her background and training."
"She is liberal, as am I," Pavia said. "Liberal without being a flaming type of do-gooder or anything of the sort. To call her a centrist would not be accurate. To call her wild-eyed would also not be accurate. She is far too rational, far too interested in the underlying facts."
Sotomayor was nominated to be a judge on the U.S. District Court for Manhattan's Southern District by President George H.W. Bush in 1991. She was confirmed the following year, becoming the first Hispanic federal judge in New York. On the court, her most memorable decision was ending the 1994 Major League Baseball strike in a decision that sided with the players against the owners.
President Bill Clinton nominated her to the appeals court in 1997, but several Republican senators blocked her nomination for more than a year. She was confirmed by a vote of 67 to 29, with most Democrats and half the Republicans voting for her.
Sotomayor was divorced as a young woman and never remarried or had children. A visitor to her office recently recalled the judge asking to see photos of his new child, and then telling the visitor that because she never had children of her own, her clerks are like her children.»
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