by Jeffrey Rosen,The New Republic
A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit,Sonia Sotomayor’s biography is so compelling that many view her as the presumptive front-runner for Obama’s first Supreme Court appointment. She grew up in the South Bronx,the daughter of Puerto Rican parents. Her father,a manual laborer who never attended high school,died a year after she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of eight. She was raised by her mother,a nurse,and went to Princeton and then Yale Law School. She worked as a New York assistant district attorney and commercial litigator before Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended her as a district court nominee to the first President Bush. She would be the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice,if you don’t count Benjamin Cardozo. (She went to Catholic schools and would also be the sixth Catholic justice on the current Supreme Court if she is,in fact,Catholic,which isn’t clear from her official biography.) And she has powerful supporters:Last month,the two senators from New York wrote to President Obama in a burst of demographic enthusiasm,urging him to appoint Sotomayor or Ken Salazar.