Obama Nominates Sonia Sotomayor To Supreme Court
WASHINGTON (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama Tuesday nominated Sonia Sotomayor, a Hispanic female federal judge, to the Supreme Court.
"I have decided to nominate an inspiring woman who I believe will make a great justice, Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the great state of New York," Obama said in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House of his choice to fill the U.S. Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice David Souter.
If confirmed by the Senate, she will be the first Hispanic Justice in the nine-member Supreme Court in the United States.
Sotomayor, 54, was born to Puerto Rican parents in Bronx, New York. After her father died when she was only nine, her mother, a nurse, raised two children alone on a modest salary.
Sotomayor earned her Bachelor's degree from the Princeton University and obtained the Juris Doctor degree from the Yale Law School, where she also served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal.
Widely considered as a political centrist, Sotomayor was nominated by former Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1991 to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She was nominated by former Democratic President Bill Clinton to the seat she now holds, as a judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.
She has been regarded as a potential Supreme Court nominee by several presidents, both Republican and Democratic, and appeared again as a candidate after Souter, 69, announced at the end of April that he would retire from the Supreme Court in June.
Author: HispanicBusiness.com, Posted on Wed, May 27, 2009
