Colleagues See Sotomayor as 'Even-Handed,' 'Brilliant'

Daughter of immigrants rose from Bronx project

By Gabriel Winant, Newser User

Posted May 26, 2009 10:13 AM CDT

(Newser) – The daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants whose father died when she was 9, Sonia Sotomayor will bring more than a stellar legal resume to her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the Washington Post reports. She worked her way out of projects in the Bronx to graduate from Princeton and Yale Law, where a former classmate says Sotomayor “was tenacious … absolutely brilliant.”

After graduating, Sotomayor worked for the Manhattan district attorney, then as a private litigator—where her employer recalls her as “liberal without being a flaming type of do-gooder” and “far too rational, far too interested in the underlying facts” to be called “wild-eyed.” She was named a district judge by the first President Bush, and a federal appeals judge by President Clinton.

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Federal judge Sonia Sotomayor poses by her office window in New York in this 1998 photo. (AP Photo)

In this Nov. 6, 1998 file photo, Peter White helps newly-inducted Judge Sonia Sotomayor put on her robe shortly after she took the oath of office as a Justice of the US Court of Appeals in New York. (AP Photo/Adam Nadel, file)

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden applaud federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor, Tuesday, May 26, 2009. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

President Barack Obama announces federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor, right, as his nominee for the Supreme Court, Tuesday May 26, 2009. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

This 2003 photo provided by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York shows Judge Sonia Sotomayor. (AP Photo)

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She's really tough to pigeonhole. This is something I saw evolving over time. She does not have an ideological litmus test for her clerks. They run the gamut. - Susan Sturm, a Columbia Law School professor and Yale Law classmate,
on Sonia Sotomayor

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Colleagues See Sotomayor as 'Even-Handed,' 'Brilliant'