Sonia Sotomayor, in full Sonia Maria Sotomayor, (born June 25, 1954, Bronx, New York, U.S.), associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 2009. She was the first Hispanic and the third woman to serve on the Supreme Court.
The daughter of parents who moved to New York City from Puerto Rico, Sotomayor was raised in a housing project in the Bronx. After the death of her father, her mother worked long hours as a nurse to support the family. Sotomayor credits the episodes of the television crime show Perry Mason (1957–66) that she watched as a child with influencing her decision to become a lawyer. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University (B.A., 1976) before attending Yale Law School, where she worked as an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She graduated in 1979 and worked for five years as an assistant district attorney in New York county before pursuing private practice in a New York firm, where she worked on intellectual property and copyright cases.
