10 Things You Didn't Know About Sonia Sotomayor

1. Sonia Sotomayor was born on June 25, 1954, in New York to parents who moved there from Puerto Rico during World War II.
2. At the age of 8, Sotomayor was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
3. Sotomayor's father was a factory worker who didn't speak English. He died when she was 9, and her mother worked six days a week as a nurse to provide for Sotomayor and her brother.
4. During her childhood, Sotomayor enjoyed Nancy Drew books. She says TV's Perry Mason inspired her to pursue a career in law.
5. She graduated as valedictorian from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx in 1972.
6. She won a scholarship to Princeton and graduated summa cum laude and as a Phi Beta Kappa member; she graduated from Yale Law School in 1979.
7. In 1992, she was appointed to the U.S. District Court by President George H. W. Bush. Her most well-known decision was issuing an injunction against Major League Baseball team owners that ended the players' strike in 1995.
8. President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1998. In that role, she overturned a lower court's ruling that Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster's suicide note was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
9. One of her most controversial rulings concerned a reverse discrimination case in which she upheld a city's decision to reject the results of a firefighter promotion test because whites outscored blacks.
10. She was married in 1976 and divorced in 1983. She has not remarried and has no children.

Sources:

• New York Daily News
• The Politico
• Los Angeles Times
• WABC-TV New York

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