Person of Interest

Sotomayor in 200 Words

A Cliffs Notes version of The Times' epic profile.

The New York Times has a monster of a profile on Sonia Sotomayor today. What can we tell you about it in 200 words? She eats tuna fish for lunch, works out three times a week, and in college “danced a mean salsa.” Her future fellow justice Samuel Alito protested the growing number of women at Princeton shortly before she arrived. Off the bench, “she has been a tireless advocate for Latinos.” At the age of 29, The New York Times Magazine described her as “an imposing woman of 29 who smoked incessantly.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan was convinced in 1991 that “Ms. Sotomayor would become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.” Her primary asset is her Greenwich Village condo, which she bought with the help of two mortgages totaling $324,000 in 1998. Of the five of her cases that the Supreme Court reviewed, three were overturned and two were affirmed, although it rejected her reasoning while accepting the outcome in one of those two. A parting quote: “My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”