page_title: Sonia Sotomayor
section_title: Awards and honors
hierarchical_section_title: Sonia Sotomayor / Awards and honors
caption_attribution_description: English: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor speaking in Tempe, Arizona.
context_page_description: Sonia Maria Sotomayor J. is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009 and has served since August 8, 2009. Sotomayor is the first Hispanic and Latina member of the Court.
  Sotomayor was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1976 and received her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. She worked as an assistant district attorney in New York for four and a half years before entering private practice in 1984. She played an active role on the boards of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board.
  Sotomayor was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in 1991; confirmation followed in 1992. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
context_section_description: Sotomayor has received honorary law degrees from Lehman College (1999), Princeton University (2001), Brooklyn Law School (2001), Pace University School of Law (2003), Hofstra University (2006), Northeastern University School of Law (2007), Howard University (2010), St. Lawrence University (2010), New York University (2012),Yale University (2013), and the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras (2014).
  She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002.  She was given the Outstanding Latino Professional Award in 2006 by the Latino/a Law Students Association. In 2008, Esquire magazine included Sotomayor on its list of "The 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century". In 2013, Sotomayor won the Woodrow Wilson Award at her alma mater Princeton University.
  In June 2010, the Bronxdale Houses development, where Sotomayor grew up, was renamed after her. The Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses and Justice Sonia Sotomayor Community Center comprise 28 buildings with some 3,500 residents. While many New York housing developments are named after well-known people, this was only the second to be named after a former resident.  In 2011, the Sonia M. Sotomayor Learning Academies, a public high school complex in Los Angeles, was named after her.
  In 2013, a painting featuring her, Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan was unveiled at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
  In May 2015 she received the Katharine Hepburn medal from Bryn Mawr College.
  In 2019, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
caption: Sotomayor at the 2017 John P. Frank Memorial Lecture at Arizona State University as the guest of honor.
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