Sotomayor: High court gets voice full of new perspective

WASHINGTON — Justice Sonia Sotomayor, easily confirmed by the Senate on Thursday, will bring something new to the Supreme Court, far beyond her being its first Hispanic member.

Her background and experiences will affect her thinking and influence her decisions, but they are likely to do so in ways that were hardly mentioned during the Senate fight over her confirmation.

She will be the only justice whose first language was not English. She spoke Spanish at home as a child, and she will join a court that enforces a federal law that calls for equal opportunity in schools for children who do not speak English.

She has been diabetic since childhood, a medical condition that is classified as a disability under the federal law that forbids discrimination against persons with physical or mental impairments.

The Senate's largely party-line vote, 68-31, brought Sotomayor, 55, to the threshold of one of America's most prestigious institutions, completing an extraordinary journey that began in a Bronx housing project where the Puerto Rican girl was raised by her widowed mother.

A White House spokesman said the judge watched the vote on television in her chambers in New York, and she released no statement.

At the White House, President Obama hailed her confirmation as "breaking yet another barrier and moving us yet another step closer to a more perfect union."

He said, "With this historic vote, the Senate has affirmed that Judge Sotomayor has the intellect, the temperament, the history, the integrity and the independence of mind to ably serve on our nation's highest court."

She will become the first justice nominated by a Democratic president to join the high court since 1994.

Conservative activists had tried to delay the confirmation vote, but Democrats pushed it through to ensure that she would be installed by September, when the court takes up a campaign-finance case left over from its last term. She is not expected to alter the balance of the court on most issues, as her views appear to be similar to those of David Souter, the retired justice she is succeeding.

But she will bring a fresh outlook.

Disability-rights advocates have suffered some big defeats in the court in the past decade, and they have high hopes for her. "We're very excited. We don't feel we have had a champion on the current court," said Andrew Imparato, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities.

She was reared in a city housing project where drugs and crime were more common than scholarly success at an Ivy League college. Sotomayor refers to herself proudly as an "affirmative-action baby," having been admitted to Princeton University with less-than-stellar SAT scores, but who nonetheless graduated with highest honors.

She will "change the conversation on affirmative action" within the court, says University of Maryland law professor Sherrilyn Ifill. The only other minority on the court, Justice Clarence Thomas, is a staunch foe, maintaining that affirmative-action policies taint the accomplishments of all minorities.

"Her story of how hard she worked to graduate first in her class from Princeton makes her really the poster child for the benefits of affirmative action," Ifill said.

Sotomayor is also a divorced woman who has no children but a close relationship with an extended family.

"She is a modern woman with a nontraditional family," said Sylvia Lazos, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "She is much more reflective of contemporary American society than the other justices like Alito and Roberts."

She was referring to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both of whom are married and have two children. The court is expected to soon face a series of cases involving the legal rights of other nontraditional families with gay and lesbian couples.

Even her personal finances look more like contemporary America as compared with her new and wealthier colleagues at the Supreme Court. According to friends, Sotomayor has struggled to pay her mortgage and her credit-card bills, and her financial disclosures show she has no substantial savings or stock portfolio.

Before becoming a judge, she served on a New York board that strictly enforced the city's campaign-finance laws, but she will be joining a court whose conservative justices are skeptical of limiting the role of money in politics.

Unlike any other current justice, she has tried cases as a prosecutor and presided over trials as judge. Friends say those experiences shaped her view of the law and judging, giving her an up-close look at how the criminal-justice system works. By contrast, most of the justices have spent their careers as law professors, government lawyers and appellate judges, all at least one step removed from trials.

"She is intensely focused on the facts, not the ideology," said Los Angeles lawyer Nancy Gray, who worked with Sotomayor as a prosecutor in New York. "In the criminal system, you often see the worst in people, the damage that crime does to victims and their families, and the revolving door of people coming through the system. She is acutely aware of all that."

Until now, most of the debate involving Sotomayor has focused on her ethnicity and gender. The impact of those aspects of her background may be subtle and not obvious in decisions, many lawyers say, but could influence her fellow justices.

After Justice Thurgood Marshall retired, several justices, including Sandra Day O'Connor and Byron White, wrote that the first African-American justice had a powerful influence through the stories he told in their private conferences. As a young lawyer, he traveled throughout the South to represent black defendants who often faced a white prosecutor, white judge and all-white jury. If his white colleagues had not thought much about how race could infect the criminal-justice system, Marshall made sure they understood.

No one suggests that new Justice Sotomayor will transform the court or prompt the veteran justices to dramatically shift their views. But on a variety of issues such as immigration, drugs, housing, criminal sentences, sex discrimination and antitrust law, she is likely to bring a fresh perspective to the court's debates.

Her diabetes and daily insulin shots were not much discussed during the hearings, but her experience is bound to influence her views, some lawyers say.

"She may be a strong voice for access to health care," Lazos said. "She will be a real player in the debates over what is a disability."

Material from The New York Times is included in this report.