Nomination and confirmation After
Barack Obama won the
2008 presidential election, speculation arose that Sotomayor could be a leading candidate for a Supreme Court seat. New York Senators
Charles Schumer and
Kirsten Gillibrand wrote Obama a letter urging him to appoint Sotomayor or Interior Secretary
Ken Salazar to the Supreme Court if a vacancy arose during his term. The White House first contacted Sotomayor on April 27, 2009, about the possibility of her nomination. On April 30, 2009, Justice
David Souter's retirement plans leaked to the press, and Sotomayor received early attention as a possible nominee for Souter's seat, to be vacated in June 2009. But in May 2009, Harvard Law Professor
Laurence Tribe urged Obama not to appoint Sotomayor, writing, "she's not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is" and "her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire and simply add to the fire power of the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas wing of the court." On May 25, 2009, Obama informed Sotomayor of his choice; she later said, "I had my [hand] over my chest, trying to calm my beating heart, literally." On May 26, Obama nominated her. She became only the second jurist to be nominated to three different judicial positions by three different presidents. The selection appeared to closely match Obama's presidential campaign promise that he would nominate judges who had "the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old." Sotomayor's nomination was praised by Democrats and liberals, and Democrats appeared to have sufficient votes to confirm her. The strongest criticism of her nomination came from conservatives and some Republican senators regarding a line she had used in similar forms in a number of her speeches, particularly in a 2001
Berkeley Law lecture: The remark now became widely known. while
John Cornyn and other Republican senators denounced such attacks but called Sotomayor's approach troubling. Sotomayor's backers offered a variety of defenses of the remark, and
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Sotomayor's word choice in 2001 had been "poor". Of Sotomayor's cases, the Second Circuit rulings in
Ricci v. DeStefano received the most attention during the early nomination discussion, motivated by the Republican desire to focus on the case's reverse racial discrimination aspect. Some of the fervor with which conservatives and Republicans viewed Sotomayor's nomination was due to their grievances over the history of federal judicial nomination battles going back to the 1987
Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination. A
Gallup poll released a week after the nomination showed 54% of Americans in favor of Sotomayor's confirmation and 28% in opposition. A June 12
Fox News poll showed 58% of the public disagreeing with her "wise Latina" remark but 67% saying the remark should not disqualify her from serving on the Supreme Court. The
American Bar Association gave her a unanimous "well qualified" assessment, its highest mark for professional qualification. After
Ricci was overruled,
Rasmussen Reports and
CNN/
Opinion Research polls showed that the public was sharply divided, largely along partisan and ideological lines, as to whether Sotomayor should be confirmed. During Sotomayor's confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which began on July 13, 2009, she backed away from her "wise Latina" remark, calling it "a rhetorical flourish that fell flat" and saying, "I do not believe that any ethnic, racial, or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment." When Republican senators confronted her about other lines from her speeches, she pointed to her judicial record and said she had never let her life experiences or opinions influence her decisions. Republican senators said that while her rulings to this point might be largely traditional, they feared her Supreme Court rulings—where there is more latitude with respect to precedent and interpretation—might be more reflective of her speeches. Sotomayor defended her position in
Ricci as following applicable precedent. In general, Sotomayor followed the hearings formula of recent nominees by avoiding stating personal positions, declining to take positions on controversial issues likely to come before the Court, agreeing with senators from both parties, and repeatedly affirming that as a justice she would just apply the law. On July 28, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13–6 to confirm Sotomayor's nomination, sending it to the full Senate for a final vote. Every Democrat voted in her favor, as did one Republican,
Lindsey Graham. On August 6, the full Senate confirmed Sotomayor by a vote of 68–31. All Democrats present, the Senate's two independents, and nine Republicans voted for her. Obama commissioned Sotomayor on the day of her confirmation, and her swearing-in ceremony took place on August 8 at the Supreme Court Building. Chief Justice
John Roberts administered the prescribed constitutional and judicial oaths of office, at which time she became the
111th justice (99th associate justice) of the Supreme Court. Sotomayor is the first
Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court,
Amy Coney Barrett (since 2020), and
Ketanji Brown Jackson (since 2022). Her appointment gave the Court a record six
Roman Catholic justices serving at the same time.
Justiceship , Sotomayor,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and
Elena Kagan. O'Connor is not wearing a robe because she is retired from the Court. Sotomayor cast her first vote as an associate Supreme Court justice on August 17, 2009, in a stay of execution case. She was given a warm welcome onto the Court and was formally
invested in a September 8 ceremony. The first case in which Sotomayor heard arguments was on September 9 during a special session,
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It involved the controversial aspect of the
First Amendment and the rights of corporations in campaign finance; Sotomayor dissented. In her vigorous examination of
Floyd Abrams, representing the First Amendment issues in the case, Sotomayor questioning the Court's 19th-century rulings and said, "What you are suggesting is that the courts, who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court's error to start with ... [imbuing] a creature of State law with human characteristics." Sotomayor's first major written opinion was a dissent in the
Berghuis v. Thompkins case dealing with
Miranda rights. During the oral arguments for
National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, Sotomayor showed her increasing familiarity with the Court and its protocols by directing the opening questions of the arguments to
Donald Verrilli, the
Solicitor General representing the government's position. In succeeding Souter, Sotomayor did not change the Court's net philosophical and ideological balance. Specifically, her voting pattern and judicial philosophy has been in close agreement with that of Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Kagan. In a 2015 article, "Ranking the Most Liberal Modern Supreme Court Justices", Alex Greer identified Sotomayor as representing a more liberal voting pattern than both Kagan and Ginsburg. Greer assigned Sotomayor the most liberal voting history of all the sitting justices, and a slightly less liberal record than her predecessors
Thurgood Marshall and
John Marshall Harlan II. Although in 2009 five of the justices self-identified as having Roman Catholic affiliation, Sotomayor's voting history identifies her singly among them with the liberal bloc of the Court. There is a wide divergence among Catholics in general in their approaches to the law. There have been some deviations from this ideological pattern. In a 2013 book on the Roberts Court, Marcia Coyle assessed Sotomayor's position on the
Confrontation Clause of the
Sixth Amendment as a strong guarantee of a defendant's right to confront their accusers. Sotomayor's judicial philosophy on the issue is seen as in parity with Kagan's and, unexpectedly for Sotomayor, also in at least partial agreement with Scalia's
originalist reading when applied to the clause. On January 20 and 21, 2013, Sotomayor administered the oath of office to Vice President
Joe Biden for
the inauguration of his second term. She became the first Hispanic and fourth woman to administer the oath to a president or vice president. On January 20, 2021, Sotomayor administered the oath of office to
Kamala Harris for
her inauguration as vice president, the first woman to ever hold the office. By the end of her fifth year on the Court, Sotomayor had become especially visible in oral arguments and in passionate dissents from various majority rulings, especially those involving issues of race, gender, and ethnic identity. She had shown her individuality on the Court in a number of decisions. In her reading of the constitutionality of the Obama health care law favoring the poor and disabled, she sided with Ginsburg against fellow liberals Breyer and Kagan. Sotomayor responded to Roberts's statement that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race", writing, "I don't borrow Chief Justice Roberts's description of what color-blindness is... Our society is too complex to use that kind of analysis." In the manufacturer liability case
Williamson v. Mazda, which the Court decided unanimously, she wrote a separate concurring opinion. Sotomayor's rapport with her clerks is seen as more formalistic than some of the other justices as she requires detailed and rigorous evaluations of cases she is considering with a table of contents attached. When compared to Kagan directly, one of their colleagues said, "Neither of them is a shrinking violet". In her 2013 book on the Roberts Court, Coyle wrote: "Both women are more vocal during arguments than the justices whom they succeeded, and they have energized the moderate-liberal side of the bench." During her tenure on the Court, Sotomayor has also been recognized as among its strongest voices in supporting the rights of the accused.
Laurence Tribe has identified her as the Court's foremost voice calling for reforming criminal justice adjudication—in particular as it relates misconduct by police and prosecutors, abuses in prisons, concerns about how the death penalty is used, and the potential for loss of privacy—and Tribe has compared her will to reform in general to that of past Chief Justice
Earl Warren. In January 2019, Bonnie Kristian of
The Week wrote that an "unexpected civil libertarian alliance" was developing between Sotomayor and
Neil Gorsuch "in defense of robust due process rights and skepticism of law enforcement overreach." Members of Sotomayor's Court staff have suggested that public institutions such as colleges and libraries where she has held lectures, speeches, and other events buy her books to have available for purchase, which reportedly earned Sotomayor $3.7 million. Sotomayor's staff has also promoted her commercial events aimed at selling her
memoir and children's books. Use of government staff is prohibited for such activities in other government branches.
Notable rulings Miranda warnings In 2011, Sotomayor wrote the majority opinion in
J.D.B. v. North Carolina, in which the Supreme Court held that age is relevant when determining when a person is in police
custody for
Miranda purposes. J.D.B. was a 13-year-old student enrolled in
special education classes whom police suspected of committing two robberies. A police investigator visited J.D.B. at school, where he was interrogated by the investigator, a uniformed police officer, and school officials. J.D.B. subsequently confessed to his crimes and was convicted. He was not given a
Miranda warning during the interrogation, nor an opportunity to contact his
legal guardian. In determining that a child's age properly informs the
Miranda custody analysis, Sotomayor wrote, "to hold... that a child's age is never relevant to whether a suspect has been taken into custody—and thus to ignore the very real differences between children and adults—would be to deny children the full scope of the procedural safeguards that
Miranda guarantees to adults". Her opinion cited
Stansbury v. California (holding that a child's age "would have affected how a reasonable person" would "perceive his or her freedom to leave") and
Yarborough v. Alvarado (holding that a child's age "generates commonsense conclusions about behavior and perception"). Sotomayor also pointed out that the law recognizes that a child's judgment is not the same as an adult's, in the form of legal disqualifications on children as a class (
e.g., limitations on a child's ability to marry without parental consent). Justice Alito wrote a dissenting opinion that three other justices joined.
Stolen Valor Act In
United States v. Alvarez (2012), the Court struck down the
Stolen Valor Act (a federal law that criminalized false statements about having received a military medal) on
First Amendment grounds. While a 6–3 majority of the Court agreed that the law was an unconstitutional violation of the
Free Speech Clause, it did not agree on a rationale. Sotomayor was among four justices, along with Roberts, Ginsburg and Kennedy, who concluded that a statement's falsity is not enough, by itself, to exclude speech from First Amendment protection. Justices Breyer and Kagan concluded that while false statements are entitled to some protection, the act was invalid because it could have achieved its objectives in less restrictive ways. Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito dissented.
Affordable Care Act In
National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), Sotomayor was part of a 5–4 majority that upheld most of the provisions of the
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (while being part of a dissent against the reliance upon the Constitution's
Taxing and Spending Clause rather than
Commerce Clause in arriving at the support). Legal writer
Jeffrey Toobin wrote, "Sotomayor's concerns tended toward the earthbound and practical. Sometimes, during oral arguments, she would go on tangents involving detailed questions about the facts of cases that would leave her colleagues stupefied, sinking into their chairs. This time, though, she had a simple line of inquiry. States require individuals to buy automobile insurance (implicitly suggesting the unavoidable comparison to health insurance and the fairness of applying the same principle to health insurance as well)." Sotomayor concluded with a rhetorical flourish directed at the attorneys: "Do you think that if some states decided not to impose an insurance requirement that the federal government would be without power to legislate and require every individual to buy car insurance?" For Toobin, this distinction Sotomayor drew was the heart of the majority's argument. The ruling, which came in the immediate wake of the Court's 5–4 decision in
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the conservative bloc had prevailed, was opposed by the court's three female members: Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and
Kagan. In her dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the case was at odds with the majority's statements in
Hobby Lobby: "Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word ... Not today." Sotomayor added that the decision risked depriving "hundreds of Wheaton's employees and students of their legal entitlement to contraceptive coverage."
Fourth Amendment, privacy rights, & qualified immunity Sotomayor has taken positions in favor of an expansive view of the
Fourth Amendment protections relating to
privacy rights and
search and seizure. In
United States v. Jones (2012), all nine justices agreed that a warrant was likely to be required before police could place a GPS tracking device on a suspect's car. Most justices sided with a narrow opinion by Justice Alito, but Sotomayor (in a lone concurrence) advocated a more expansive view of privacy rights in a digital age, calling for a reassessment of the longstanding
third-party doctrine: "It may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties." Law professors
Adam Winkler and
Laurence Tribe were among those who said that Sotomayor's
Jones concurrence had been influential in calling out the need for a new basis for privacy requirements in a world, as she wrote, "in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks." In
Utah v. Strieff, a case involving the
exclusionary rule, Sotomayor dissented from the Court's ruling that evidence obtained as a result of an illegal police stop could be admitted if the stopped person was later found to have an outstanding traffic warrant, writing that it was a "remarkable proposition" that the existence of a warrant could justify a stop illegally based on police officers' "whim or hunch".
Abortion In ''
Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson'' (2021), a case regarding a Texas abortion law that allows private citizens to sue abortion providers, Sotomayor wrote a sharp dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Breyer and Kagan. By a 5–4 vote, the Supreme Court upheld the Texas law. Sotomayor concluded: "While the Court properly holds that this suit may proceed against the licensing officials, it errs gravely in foreclosing relief against state-court officials and the state attorney general. By so doing, the Court leaves all manner of constitutional rights more vulnerable than ever before, to the great detriment of our Constitution and our Republic." In her dissenting opinion in
Department of State v. Muñoz (2024), Sotomayor called ''
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization'' (2022) the "eradication of the right to abortion". ==Other activities==